Apropos of nothing in particular

I watched The Lives of Others again recently, and it held up very well indeed. For anyone who missed it on its previous theatrical and home video releases, the film is set in “East” Berlin (how archaic the distinction begins to sound!) in 1984, an odd choice of era in which to depict a surveillance-obsessed society.

Playwright Georg Dreyman, a cosseted darling of the German Democratic Republic, is so obviously a socialist believer that the regime has never troubled itself to monitor him until an influential Central Committee member develops a lech for Dreyman’s girlfriend. Ferocious, über-straitlaced Stasi operative Gerd Wiesler (brilliantly—brilliantly!—depicted by the late actor Ulrich Mühe, already mortally ill during filming) is assigned to monitor the comings(!) and goings at Chez Dreyman to get the goods on the dramatist and clear the field for his powerful rival. Unfortunately for the designs of swinish Minister Hempf and of sleek Oberstleutnant Anton Grubitz, Wiesler’s old classmate and now superior, their chosen instrument proves to be that dangerous tool, a true believer: a devotee of the socialist ideal as sincere as the object of his clandestine scrutiny. Slowly (and the film is masterful in conveying the gradual erosion of the spy’s zeal) a sympathy develops between the watcher and the watched, and Wiesler is by imperceptible degrees transformed from persecutor to protector.

We were visiting Seattle some years back when The Lives of Others had its theatrical release in this country, and it was playing at a small cinema near our bed & breakfast. I’d hoped to see it then, but in the event we were obliged to await its release on DVD. What I remember from that first viewing, and what particularly impressed me on the reprise, was how intelligently the ending was handled. My own sensibilities and expectations debauched by so much of the American product, I experienced a rising sense of dread during the closing minutes first time out. “Oh, no,” I thought. “Without a foot set wrong the past two hours, the director is going to ruin everything with this sentimental and obvious denouement?”

I needn’t have worried, and ought to have had more faith. Thank god that Steven Spielberg didn’t have the conn. Anyway, if you haven't seen it yet, you ought to.

Ides of March

After a youth spent in the postwar suburbs of southern California, the first time I lived in a house older than myself was in Santa Cruz. It was a rundown, ill-maintained Victorian rented out to undergraduates as individual rooms, and I didn’t care for it. I spent a summer the following year in a pleasanter house of the same vintage, but I never did warm to the Victorian feng shui. Then I moved to Oakland. I lived for fifteen years—from mid-September 1977 to mid-March 1993—in a lovely craftsman bungalow in Oakland’s tony Rockridge district. I was married when I moved in; divorced a few years, and still in shock a bit from the dreadful endgame, when I was compelled to vacate the premises twenty years ago today. I had externalized a great deal of my identity back then, about half as “husband” and the rest as “the guy with the cool old house.” It was accordingly a mere wraith that limped away from the house on Hillegass Avenue to inferior and charmless premises a few blocks distant.

Today I live in an area I would then have derided as “Baja Oakland,” in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood (and young: I confess that I regard the reliably middle-aged and prosperous sidewalk population on College Avenue as a bit more simpatico) and a house in some respects as good as and in some others better than the old place. I still regularly find myself in dreams back at Hillegass—generally in a state of panic, realizing that the new owners are due back at any moment, and that I must needs decamp.

Anyway, here’s a close re-creation of the postcard I sent out (social media being then at a somewhat primitive stage of its development) to friends announcing my forced relocation. I was feeling...ill-used.

Dognition

“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog…” well, you know.

A great deal of highly entertaining, vastly ill-informed, largely anthropomorphic material has been written over the centuries on canine intelligence. The following entry is my modest contribution to this venerable undertaking.

Daniel Dennett, a philosopher whose work I’ve followed and admired for many years, has written extensively on the phenomenon of consciousness, and on evolution by natural selection (Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, largely devoted to the latter, includes an excellent chapter on the former, enlarging on ideas earlier set forth in the audaciously-titled Consciousness Explained). He once observed (or so I would have said until a few months ago when I attempted to locate the vaguely-remembered citation) something to the effect that notwithstanding our close genetic kinship with the higher primates, it has been Canis lupus familiaris, the common dog, and not the chimp, bonobo or gorilla, that has been under intense selective pressure for the species’ last four thousand generations or so to understand human language. For at least 15,000 years, humanity has been the livelihood of the dog. Upon our toleration and goodwill the dog has relied, and these elements it has attempted to conduce after hard study. Market demographers may bring to bear more sophisticated tools to their assignments, but Rover has a good deal more fur in the game. The stakes (and the steaks, adds my own pet, anticipating this evening's table scraps) are very high.

I could be mistaken about Dennett, incidentally. Much of what I've googled as I've prepared for this essay suggests that he’s not inclined to credit Man’s Best Friend with the “intentional stance,” a term he devised to describe a form of sentience that possesses both an interior mental state and an awareness that other beings are possessed of interior mental states. Now as it happens, researchers (no doubt funded by your taxes, by the sweat of your brow, droplets of dollars that might be better funneled into the development of more lethal unmanned aircraft) have lately caught out squirrels in two different patterns of behavior as they secrete nuts against future need: if the squirrel is confident that it is unobserved by one of its fellows, it will go ahead and bury the savory treat. If it believes itself watched, however, it will go through the motions of hiding its treasure underground, but will actually leave the scene with the nut stuffed in its cheek, subsequently burying it in a location deemed more secure. This certainly looks to me like the intentional stance manifested in a brain not much larger than, well, an acorn. I’m going to guess that even a relatively stupid dog can rise to this level of abstraction.

Placed in the south forty (square yards) for the purposes of voiding his bladder or bowels, or merely patrolling the perimeter to make it inhospitable to the raccoons or possums or (shudder) families of skunks that occasionally send scouts behind the house, Ravi the family dog will signal his readiness to return to the interior by scratching politely, and lightly, on the kitchen door. If after a couple of repetitions he receives no response, he will ramp up the gesture with considerably more energy. On one occasion, when the spousette and I had retired with each of us supposing that the other had readmitted the pet, I was awakened an hour later by the violent and unprecedented clatter of dog claws on a bedroom window, suggesting to me that the creature (a) knew where we were and (b) brought to bear the intentional stance in his apparent belief that we possessed attention to be roused and that proximity was likely to be efficacious in securing that attention.

When I was a child, the prevailing notion of animals in the culture was something along the lines of Cartesian automata. They were governed by “instinct,” which alone produced flinches or howls if the creature was struck: no actual pain was experienced. Alongside this received wisdom, of course, people still spoke to their pets and lavished affection on them, but many did so while simultaneously believing that there was no one home, that they were sharing their lives with what amounted to furry appliances bereft of emotions, much less of any higher cognition. Much more recently (well, 1999) there was an article in The Atlantic (featured on the cover as “Why Does Your Dog Pretend to Like You?”) that painted the pooches as evolutionary opportunists:

If some advertiser or political consultant could figure out just what it is in human psychology that makes us willing to believe that dogs are loyal, trustworthy, selfless, loving, courageous, noble, and obedient, he could retire to his own island in the Caribbean in about a week with what he would make peddling that secret. Dogs belong to that select group of con artists at the very top of the profession, the ones who pick our pockets clean and leave us smiling about it. Dogs take from the rich, they take from the poor, and they keep it all. They lie on top of the air-conditioning vent in the summer; they curl up by the fireplace in the winter; they commit outrages against our property too varied and unspeakable to name. They decide when we may go to bed at night and when we must rise in the morning, where we may go on vacation and for how long, whom we may invite over to dinner, and how we should decorate our living rooms. They steal the very bread from our plates (I'm thinking here of a collie I used to have whose specialty actually was toast). If we had roommates who behaved like this, we'd be calling a lawyer, or the police.

I approach the subject of dog sensibilities without professional credential. I’ve shared quarters with canines for about twenty-five years out of the four-plus decades since I left the parental premises to seek my fortune—an elusive target, to be sure—and have derived considerable moral improvement from the experience. I could wish, looking back, that as a young man I’d been more attentive to the needs of Takoma (1971-1985; a series of common roofs during the latter nine years of his span), a preternaturally intelligent husky/border collie/Australian shepherd mix, and if I peer into the remote reaches of mid-adolescence there was Sam, an amiable mongrel of scrambled pedigree, who was devoted to me during our twenty months’ association. My post-nuclear family was a very unstable isotope in the mid-sixties, and another in a series of covalent cataclysms separated Sam and me forever in 1968.

I acquired Takoma, AKA “Tako,” by marriage in 1976. The poor dog expired early in 1985 after an abbreviated but harrowing decline, and the marriage followed suit the following year in a somewhat more prolonged but comparably grim endgame. I still tell the story of how one afternoon about a third of a century ago Tako approached me in my study—I was at work in those days on a novel for which I then still held high hopes—and repeatedly nudged my elbow. Well, that was properly the muse's place, and I brusquely ignored the dog with mounting irritation until he went to the kitchen, retrieved a spent tin of catfood from the trash, returned to the study and dropped the can with a clatter at my feet: looked at me, looked pointedly down, looked at me again. It occurred to me at that point that the creature had not eaten all day owing to my neglect, the spousette being out of town for the weekend, of the standard feeding drill. This is of course anecdotal evidence only, but it seems to me at least to imply an intentional stance, and then some.

Much more consistent attention was paid to Napalm (1993-2011; described elsewhere in this blog), whose behavior first led me to posit the (metaphorical) existence of a canine “language module,” an abstraction level spun up upon receipt of a human signal that verbal interaction impends. We used to joke that Napalm could parse moderately complex English sentences once he was convinced that table scraps were in play. I do believe that my hypothetical language module, requiring as it does in my model a certain expenditure of energy on the part of the dog, might explain in part the episodes of canine deafness with which we’re all familiar. Dogs are method actors: “what’s my motivation?” indeed. Ravi, then about a year old, joined the household at the end of 2008, and I have observed him perhaps too closely for any pretense of objectivity. It’s impossible for me not to be sentimental about him, but I don’t believe that familiarity has utterly debauched my critical faculties. I’ll report, you deride.

Tone of voice, physical presence, eye contact and body language probably precede phonemes. Ravi will lie at one end of the dining room during a dinner party, and the conversation will be background noise merely to him. No words will register. We adopt a special tone (at least half an octave higher than the normal conversational timbre in my case) in addressing him, and this appears to be processed as a signal for attention: the language module spins up. Usually an early phrase directed at the dog is either “Ravi?” (put language module in fifth gear!) and/or “Do you want…?”

Do you want is taken, I suspect, as a single unit of meaning, signifying to the dog that what follows the magic syllables is a proposition. Poor old Takoma well understood the difference between the subsequent “…go outside” (the back yard) and “go for a walk” (out to crap in Safeway’s ivy on Claremont Avenue) and would cower in the former instance or head enthusiastically for the vestibule in the latter. The late Napalm processed the phrase in like fashion, as does Ravi.

Ravi has only to hear the word “walk” pronounced with the appropriate inflection, or to see one of his leashes held up for his inspection in order to know that an excursion impends. He understands “treat” and “Happy Hips” (the brand name of a particularly coveted doggie delight—I speak it aloud when he dawdles returning from an excursion, and he tends to pick up the pace unless there’s a particularly provocative piece of pee-mail still being processed). On walks, which we undertake leashless wherever this is practical, he responds appropriately to “heel,” “hold it” and “wait for me” (urgency of tone is a factor in each case). Lina has been working to get him to process “go left” and “go right”; I remain as yet unconvinced that she’s made much progress toward that end (I think he’s responding much more to nonverbal cues here).

Let’s return for a moment to the Cartesian automata model to which I alluded above. Those who hold that dogs do not or cannot rise to the level of the intentional stance at least have the significant differences between primate and canine brains to back them up. But primal feelings? Rage, fear, anticipation, excitement, lust, pain—yes, and sorrow, and love—don’t these reach us from deeper substrates of our layered grey matter? The appreciation of a sonata (I do not, incidentally, believe that dogs process music, for reasons I may enlarge upon anon) engages our high-level processing, but grief? Loneliness? Shame? These may be mediated and experienced through higher levels of human consciousness, but they emanate from buried structures we share with our pets and, for that matter, with the beasts we carnivorous hominids routinely consume (another topic for a future blog entry).

Ultimately I think it matters less whether dogs actually understand our words—I believe that Ravi does, and there is experimental evidence to suggest that one particularly brilliant border collie (a breed universally acknowledged to occupy the upper reaches of canine cognition) has not merely mastered a vocabulary of over a thousand words, but can also process the rudiments (verb-subject) of grammar—than whether a spectrum interspecies communication that extends to a level of abstraction, language forming one band of this spectrum, is taking place. If it is, then something remarkable has occurred over the millennia, a development that eluded the grasp of the author of “Why Does Your Dog Pretend to Like You?” fourteen years ago. We have established a kind of communion, on a fairly sophisticated level, with an intelligent representative of the animals (there are others, of course. I believe that the connection with domestic cats is conducted at a significantly lower level of abstraction. I can’t speak from experience of horses or livestock), and at least among societies that can afford a class prosperous and indulgent enough to support household pets we have a population of, well, quislings. We humans are so routinely callous in our depredations upon the other animal species of this planet that if they were magically raised to sentience, their vision of the demonic would certainly take two-legged form. We have invaded and now occupy the planet as harshly and proudly as ever Nazis lorded over France, and yet…here there trot at our heels our very own collaborators, who may not have welcomed the human hegemony at the outset, but who have bound their fates with us and even (heaven help!) love us. We have an obligation to be kind to them, don’t you think?

On American Mid-Century Middlebrow

I've decided that I approve.

I'm very keenly aware that the rising tide of my advancing years is hurling me toward the shoals of old fartitude, and that the most conspicuous features of that deadly lee shore are precisely those that summon up the keenest yearning for a vanished past. Fortunately (fortunately?) I am lashed to the mast of my forward progress toward…well, you know. The past is irrecoverable, and howsoever much those pangs may afflict me (and I first remember a sense that the Good Old Days had slipped irretrievably behind me in 1958, the year I turned six), I'm not going home again.

But geez, I do miss the cultural polity that was a model for the striving US middle class in the calm and complacent fifties and sixties. Complacent? There were, to be sure, nerve-racking episodes like the Cuban Missile Crisis of half a century ago, but with the admittedly conspicuous exception of the fear of being blown to isotopes, there was a certain security in believing that rational men were seeing to the affairs of the country. The American middle class of the day was largely optimistic and hence progressive: if upward mobility was a condition of civic and economic life, who would not look forward to the future? But this model of economic advancement had its counterpart in the intellectual realm: the suburbs, seeded with college grads who'd made it that far on the strength of the GI Bill, would breed a brighter new generation for a confident country at the top of its game. I'm thinking particularly of what has lately been called the “Mad Men” era, from the late Eisenhower years through the abrupt end of Kennedy’s Camelot, with that forward momentum of idealism and optimism carrying the culture into mid-decade, when those characteristics began rapidly to transmogrify into something rich and strange and still quarreled over as the so-called “Sixties.”

I'll pause here to make the standard and obligatory stipulation (obligatory, that is, for those of us outside the fevered fantasies of the nascent brownshirt movement that afflicts our public life today) that the era under consideration is not universally remembered as a vanished golden age by sundry classes of then politically, economically, culturally or sexually disenfranchised Americans. You may imagine this disclaimer to be as eloquent and as detailed as you like, and I will sign it.

I’m considering here the cultural climate, as perhaps descried from the managerial and professional classes of the day, obtaining from about 1959 to 1965: the stories they told themselves, the stories they listened to, the stories they felt appropriate for their children.

Exhibit A: The Time-Life “Great Ages of Man” series. This twenty-one volume series, handsomely produced, lavishly illustrated, well-written by noted scholars (although subjected, one suspects, to a certain amount of sanding and polishing to impart to the narrative surface the distinctive triumphalist wordview of publisher Henry R. “American Century” Luce), were sold by subscription to suburban households across This Great Land of Ours between 1965 and 1968. Each volume treated a Great Age: Imperial Rome. Ancient Egypt. Classical Greece. Early India. Byzantium. Rise of Russia. Renaissance. I own them all, having begun adulthood owning perhaps a fifth of the series and completing the collection in the decades since by application variously to the used bookstores with which neighboring Berkeley is well stocked and, these latter years, to online commerce. I have also purchased complete sets for two or three teenaged children of friends.

When I present these books to youngsters to whom I doubtless appear an eccentric, almost grotesque social appendage of their parents, I’m careful to warn them that notwithstanding the high production values and sound scholarship of the books, they are drenched in some cultural assumptions that will sound an odd note to a young person educated in the polyglot and polycultural environment of the Bay Area, which appears sometimes for better or for worse (for better, is my own guess) to be shedding the skin of the traditional American nation-state and morphing into something I can’t yet see the outlines of. The series title is “The Great Ages of Man”; left unsaid at the time but loud and clear nonetheless was the message that of all Man’s Great Ages there could be little doubt that the Greatest of all of these was the Age and culture that produced “The Great Ages of Man.” Occasionally this lofty assumption of cultural superiority became explicit and even cringeworthy, as in one of the concluding paragraphs of the volume Ancient America:

The strange civilizations of the ancient Americans will never rise again. Developed in isolation, they were imperfect and could not compete with the dynamic world culture that crossed the Atlantic with the Spaniards.

It’s more than a little unfair, though, to judge the cultural assumptions of half a century ago against our enlightened standards of 2012. I guarantee that some of today's most comfortable premises are going to look at best pretty comical in 2062.

What I admire today about the "Great Ages" books is how well-written and edited they are, and how they were aimed primarily at an audience of high schoolers. High schoolers and their parents, I should say: there was a common ethos of intellectual self-improvement. Today, I fear, these volumes would soar above the heads of tenth-graders and their sires. Nevertheless: Discount the American chest-beating and there are riches of historical knowledge here—not a lot to satisfy a serious scholar, but enough to enrich a young person’s context for future input.

Exhibit B: Horizon Magazine was an upper-middlebrow quarterly published between hard covers for about twenty years beginning in 1958. My parents, who had intellectual aspirations, subscribed for a few years early on, and tended to leave copies on the coffee table. Beginning just the past few years I’ve been collecting old numbers beginning with the maiden issue, and these have constituted such happy nightstand reading that I will probably aim eventually for the entire run (eventually rising production costs forced the publication, following a change of ownership, from hard covers into the conventional magazine format: I am sufficiently the middlebrow child of my parents for this to constitute a dealbreaker).

Horizon is a delight. Its early issues engage still. Let us consider Volume 1, Number 3, from January 1959. What riches there are in its 144 pages, unsullied by adverts! Noted architect and historian Allan Temko writes about “The Flowering of San Francisco.” Arthur C. Clarke contributes a piece, penned immediately post-Sputnik, on “Space and the Spirit of Man.” There’s a piece on “A New Music Made with a Machine,” profiling Stockhausen, Cage and others who were about to transform the upper echelons of music. P.G. Wodehouse and Somerset Maugham each contribute humorous pieces, George Plimpton interviews Hemingway in Cuba and William K. Zinsser, who was then thirty-seven and is now ninety, writes humorously but without being too condescending about the follies of the then-young in “The Tyranny of the Teens.” Incidentally, the very youngest of the teens Zinsser was poking fun at in January 1959 are about to turn sixty-seven, and the oldest, seventy-three.

What impresses me about the thirty some-odd issues of Horizon I’ve scored to date is how eminently civilized they are. I live in fear lest a back issue somehow come in physical contact with, say, the average individual who leaves a comment on a news story posted at Yahoo: surely the collision would obliterate all life, property and matter within a 400km radius of Macon GA.

What I think doesn’t matter, of course, and whether or not my ears are stopped, this ship of fate sails where it will, and the siren song of the past affects its course not at all. But I miss the placid shallows of half a century ago, and I miss the mild middlebrow ethos that yearned for self-improvement rather than the Dionysian wallow in anti-intellectualism that lately appears ever-poised to overtake us.

Another one over the side, alas

Connie, Gail Coney's cherished pooch, died early in August after a brief bout with a wasting disease (she is pictured here in July, shortly after its onset was first observed). Connie was a loyal dog, adored by all who knew her and particularly by our own Ravi, who will not again get to lick her ears.

A Dog Has Died

My dog has died.
I buried him in the garden
next to a rusted old machine.

Some day I'll join him right there,
but now he's gone with his shaggy coat,
his bad manners and his cold nose,
and I, the materialist, who never believed
in any promised heaven in the sky
for any human being,
I believe in a heaven I'll never enter.
Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom
where my dog waits for my arrival
waving his fan-like tail in friendship.

Ai, I'll not speak of sadness here on earth,
of having lost a companion
who was never servile.
His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine
withholding its authority,
was the friendship of a star, aloof,
with no more intimacy than was called for,
with no exaggerations:
he never climbed all over my clothes
filling me full of his hair or his mange,
he never rubbed up against my knee
like other dogs obsessed with sex.

No, my dog used to gaze at me,
paying me the attention I need,
the attention required
to make a vain person like me understand
that, being a dog, he was wasting time,
but, with those eyes so much purer than mine,
he'd keep on gazing at me
with a look that reserved for me alone
all his sweet and shaggy life,
always near me, never troubling me,
and asking nothing.

Ai, how many times have I envied his tail
as we walked together on the shores of the sea
in the lonely winter of Isla Negra
where the wintering birds filled the sky
and my hairy dog was jumping about
full of the voltage of the sea's movement:
my wandering dog, sniffing away
with his golden tail held high,
face to face with the ocean's spray.

Joyful, joyful, joyful,
as only dogs know how to be happy
with only the autonomy
of their shameless spirit.

There are no good-byes for my dog who has died,
and we don't now and never did lie to each other.

So now he's gone and I buried him,
and that's all there is to it.

—Pablo Neruda

“The crowd loved it!”

He went there!

“No, no, not a swipe,” Romney said. “I’ve said throughout the campaign and before, there’s no question about where he was born. He was born in the U.S. This was fun about us, and coming home. And humor, you know, we’ve got to have a little humor in a campaign.”

Yaaa-suh massah!

Bad Moon Rising: Annals of Batshit Crazy

In the news today (is it a full moon? —no, not until month’s end) we have a New Hampshire candidate for sheriff who proposes to use “deadly force” in defense of the unborn, a tactic formerly the exclusive province of freelancers, and a Texas “judge” (the title is apparently understood differently in this part of the state) who wants additional funding to arm the good people of Lubbock County for the coming insurrection against the Kenyan Usurper.

All very droll, of course. But this is what the modern GOP is slowly becoming as, behind the personable faces of its 2012 standard bearers, it begins (in Martin Amis’ marvelous phrase) visibly to fizz with rabies. I remember catching Pat Buchanan’s disastrous address to the red-meat crowd at the Republican convention twenty years ago, and thinking that I understood for the first time the sentiments underlying the Yugoslavian civil war, that it was mutually intolerable to Pat’s people and to mine that we should be compelled to share a national identity in common. This was half-jocular on my side, but not more than a fifth part, I suspect, on Pat’s. These jokers, though, make Buchanan sound (in someone’s online formulation today—I forget where) like “Kindly Old Uncle Gestapo.” As a young Nixon staffer, incidentally, PB explicitly recommended shattering the nation’s social and political consensus, such as it ever was, on the grounds that Nixon would be in a position to grab most of the pieces. This was, of course, the tactic employed by Milosevic in Yugoslavia after Tito’s death, and I think it has been the GOP’s operating procedure ever since Bush the Elder lost the election (largely courtesy of mad Ross Perot, with KOUG giving a kind assist). In practice the Republicans have ever since practiced tyranny in power while attempting to make the country ungovernable during their periods of opposition. Now we see officeholders openly discussing Second Amendment remedies to the intolerable spectacle of the Other in office.

Milosevic and his confederates worked for ten years to undermine the consensus and institutions that held Yugoslavia together before they were able to launch the bloodbath they yearned for. We are fortunate here in that our principal blood feud goes back only three or four generations (I have a sister-in-law whose grandfather fought in the Civil War), whereas the Serbs, Croats, Muslims and Albanians sipped well-fermented thirteenth-century grudges from their mothers’ milk. And yet, and yet. In my lifetime our artificial two-party duopoly has more nearly resembled the post-Stalin Soviet Union, with its facade of choice, than the lively multi-party democracies of postwar western Europe, but until recently this constrained system performed the signal service of locking the lunatic fringe out of the action. Now that lunatic fringe—or rather, its violent  offspring—has eaten out one of the parties from within. I should rejoice that my old complaint that the parties were indistinguishable from one another in the main particulars has been addressed. We now have a true two-party system. Unfortunately, one party is led by timid opportunists, and the other consists of a motley coalition of lunatics, plutocrats, demagogues, grifters and criminals. In a perfect world this wouldn’t have been my choice, but it is a choice, by God, and these frothing God-botherers need to be put down hard at the ballot box, unless you want Sheriff Szabo and Judge Head to be calling the shots.

Cripes. These people make Lyndon LaRouche look like Bob Dole.