Not That You Asked (9780307822215) (3 page)

All I remember about the textbooks I had in school is that most of them weren't very good. We learned more from the teachers than from the books, and the teachers who relied most on textbooks were the weakest.

I have a letter written by Barbara Everett, “editor, Language Arts Department, Elementary-High Division” of the Merrill Publishing Company, one of the biggest in the textbook business.

You can bet that when anyone announces herself as editor of the Language Arts Department of anything, you're in for trouble.

It turns out that Barbara wants my permission to use an essay I wrote for inclusion in one of their seventh-grade textbooks, but she wants to make some changes in it.

“I have marked the changes we would like to make,” the letter says. “I have made slight additions to paragraphs one and two so that the readability will be closer to seventh grade. In paragraph five I deleted references to cookies, which are junk food and therefore may not be mentioned in textbooks.”

Well, Barbara, in answer to your question of whether Merrill may use my essay in its textbook, no.

I think seventh graders would probably understand the essay the way I wrote it but even if they could not, I have no inclination to try to make it any easier for them. No writer, except maybe Bill Buckley, likes to exclude anyone from understanding what he's written but it is always wrong for a writer, or for that matter a parent or a teacher, to talk down or write down to anyone. If you write simply and directly, children will understand. Even if they are a little confused at first, they'll get the
general idea. Then they'll associate the general idea with the words you've used and get to understand them. This is the learning process.

By the time children reach the seventh grade, teachers should be talking to them the way they talk to adults. For one thing, it is almost impossible for an adult to judge what changes should be made in a sentence to make it simpler for a child to understand, so the best course to follow is to say it or write it as well as you are able. Don't give them seventh-grade baby talk.

The trouble with most textbooks is they've turned into characterless pap. So many groups are applying so much pressure to teachers, boards of education and textbook publishers that by the time everything anyone objects to has been deleted there's nothing of any substance left.

Children should be exposed to all the ideas there are so they can choose for themselves. One of the best teachers I ever had would have been thrown out of a lot of schools or colleges because he was left of liberal. As kids we talked and laughed about how favorably he looked on communism, but it didn't make any of us into communists. People underestimate the ability of young students to sort things out.

Now, Barbara, while I have your attention, let me talk to you about cookies. I don't know how to start but let me just say that the cookies Aunt Anna made were not junk food. There are a lot of commercial cookies that aren't junk food, either. Have you tried Pepperidge Farm's crisp molasses cookies recently, or their oatmeal raisin? On behalf of the cookie makers and cookie eaters of the world, amateur and professional, I resent your slurring reference to our product.

Have you never enjoyed an Oreo, a Hydrox, a Social Tea? Are you knocking Fig Newtons? There may not be a lot of wheat germ, fiber or vitamin B in Animal Crackers but are they really bad for kids? Marijuana and cocaine I can understand not mentioning, but chocolate chip and macaroons? Does Merrill really think that by never mentioning the word
cookie
in one of its textbooks, it will improve the health of the nation?

No, Barbara, I don't want anything I've written used in a junk textbook.

Romance is either dead or seriously ill, having been swept off its feet by sex. Too bad there isn't room for both.

The conventions of a love affair, beginning with an introduction and the gradual process of getting to know someone better, are things of the past. Young women are no longer coy or reserved. They're as aggressive as young men.

The word “courting” has all but disappeared from the language and if a young man asked a girl's father for his daughter's hand in marriage, the father might assume the boy was on drugs.

Engagements are scarce. Every once in a while you read of one but it usually means the couple has been living together for a few years and decided there's some tax advantage in making it official and want to warn their friends in advance.

Women are as capable of opening a car door as men and yet there is something good about a world in which lovers' manners call for the door to be opened by the man on certain occasions. When a man stands behind a woman and pushes the chair forward as she sits down at the dinner table even though she doesn't need the help, it establishes a civilized relationship on a dinner date that can last the whole meal.

The novelists of the nineteenth century wouldn't be published today, because their characters seldom get undressed or go to bed together in the pages of their books. Women in hoop skirts dropped their handkerchiefs as if by accident as a trick for getting the attention of young men. Characters in old novels actually blushed. I haven't read of a woman blushing in a novel for years. You don't blush lying down.

Would Romeo have had to climb up the trellis to reach Juliet on the balcony if he were wooing her today? He would not. She'd stand on the balcony and say, “Hey, Romeo, I'm in the bedroom—come on up.” Romeo would go in the front door and walk up the stairs, waving hello to her parents in the living room as he heads for their daughter's bedroom.

I came across a letter Victor Hugo, the great French author, wrote
to his true love, Adele Foucher, in 1822. He told her of dreaming that they would go away together before they were married.

“But do not think, my noble Adele, that I would have taken advantage of so much happiness,” he wrote. “You would have been the object most worthy of respect, the being most respected by your Victor. You might on the journey have even slept in the same chamber without fearing that he would alarm you by a touch or even have looked at you. Only I should have slept, or watched wakefully in a chair, or lying on the floor by the side of your bed, the protector of your slumbers. The rights to watch over you would have been the only of your husband's rights that your slave would have aspired to, until a priest had given him all the others.”

Victor may have been laying it on a little heavy in that letter and was probably hoping he'd be invited to sleep somewhere except on the floor but still it shows you how far in the wrong direction the world has traveled when it comes to romance.

It's hard to believe there will ever be a revival of the light, romantic little songs of not so long ago. “Don't sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me.” It just wouldn't make a rock video.

“I wonder who's kissing her now? I wonder who's teaching her how?” The song didn't even have a double meaning when it was popular. “I wonder if she … ever tells him of me … I wonder who's kissing her now?”

Now the lyrics of most popular songs, as Ed Newman says, seem to be mostly “Ba-buh, Ba-buh, Ba-buh.”

Romance, Romance, wherefore art thou, Romance?

The worst Russian of all for Americans may be Mikhail Gorbachev.

Gorbachev appears to be making so many good changes in the Soviet Union that it's getting harder and harder for us to complain about our favorite enemy, the Russians. What are we going to do without someone to hate?

“We are going to deprive you of our ‘enemy' image,” a Soviet official told the CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl.

Given the fact that there are eighteen million bureaucrats in the
Soviet Union, one off-the-record statement by a lone official like that may not mean much but it's a great remark, and if our basic distrust of the Russians begins to be undermined by their doing the right thing, Americans won't know how to behave.

If the Russians ever deprive us of the great pleasure and righteous satisfaction we've derived from hating them all these years, it will be difficult for us to replace it. Every individual, every ethnic group, every country needs another individual, another ethnic group or another country to hate. Hate is what makes the world go round. Some people's idea of patriotism is to hate other countries.

If the Russians start behaving like civilized citizens of the world, we're going to have to look for someone else to be the bad guys in our movies.

When I was growing up in the 1930s, Hollywood was still using World War I German submarine commanders with monocles as their villains. Erich Von Stroheim was the perfect evil enemy as he looked through his periscope and saw an American battleship in the crosshairs.

During and immediately after World War II, Nazis, Gestapo agents and sneaky little Japanese served Hollywood as our enemy prototypes. Peter Lorre played some of those parts.

For at least thirty-five years now, the Russians have served our need for bad guys and they've been perfect for the job. Their evil dictatorship, their closed society, their secretiveness, their building of the Berlin Wall, their ruthless KGB, their refusal to let their own citizens out or to let the rest of the world in all made Russia the perfect target for our hate. In addition, Russians look so much like Americans that casting was easier than when the Japanese were the enemy right after World War II. There was a limited supply of Japanese actors and none of them were very convincing.

If Gorbachev opens the Soviet society, lets us in and Russians out, as it appears he is doing, and then tears down the Berlin Wall, what in the world are we going to do for an enemy?

Who do we have who could play the Ayatollah Khomeini … and would he be a proper opponent for Sylvester Stallone? Most of us wouldn't recognize an Iranian if we saw one.

There was a time, years ago, when Americans couldn't distinguish a Japanese from a Chinese. Today, none of us would know an Iranian from an Iraqi, so neither of those would make good Hollywood enemies.

It seems apparent that the Russians are coming our way. Their socialized society isn't working as well as our free-enterprise system—which
isn't working very well, either—and they're trying to change it. Difficult as it may be for some of us to revise our dislike and distrust of everything Russian, it may be time for cautious change.

I've had some terrible times in three visits I've made to Russia as a working journalist. It was frustrating and I was often scared. Our daughter Ellen studied Russian in college and I took her with me on one trip. She went out at night with some Russians she'd made friends with. I gave her $100 and thought she'd change them into rubles at a bank. She came back that night, after having bought dinner for everyone, with $500 worth of rubles. She'd traded on the black market.

I had visions of both of us spending six years in a Russian prison.

Every American who has gone there has had the same emotion when he or she gets out. You have this great feeling of relief and joy at being in the free world again. It doesn't matter whether the first landing in the free world is Finland, France, London or New York—you feel like kissing the ground. If Gorbachev makes Americans feel at home in Moscow, what fun will it be to go there?

As satisfactory as the Russians have been as enemies, we have to hope that time is over. It would be nice to stop assuming we are about to fight a nuclear war with them. It would be nice to stop thinking of Russia as our enemy. I never met a Russian as mean and macho as Rambo.

A former president of Yale University is now something he says he's always wanted to be, commissioner of baseball.

This is of particular interest to me, because one of the few jobs I've always secretly thought I could do—without knowing anything about the game—is manage a baseball team. I'd just learn to chew tobacco and spit.

It's interesting when someone leaves what he or she is doing to do something completely different. A person has to have a lot of nerve and ability to do it. Dr. A. Bartlett Giamatti, a renowned scholar and the author of several books, among them one called
A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton
, had been a successful administrator at Yale and there's no reason to think he can't transfer that ability to
baseball. I'm not so sure he'll find a place to use his variorum knowledge of Milton or even a place to use the word
variorum
in baseball.

The question that comes to my mind is this: Could someone who has been a manager in baseball make the same job change in reverse that Dr. Giamatti has made? Could Billy Martin, for example, take over as president of Yale?

I don't think we'll ever know, because baseball is more willing to take a chance on Giamatti than Yale would be to try Billy Martin. I personally know several Yale graduates who wouldn't want Martin at Yale but I don't know any ex–baseball players who mind having Giamatti … or who'd ever heard of him, for that matter.

The idea of people changing jobs is a good one, though. More of us should do it. Too many people get stuck doing the same dull thing all their lives without ever finding out whether they have the ability to do something else.

Most of us don't dare change jobs. We're chicken. If we're making an OK living so we're able to pay the mortgage or the rent, the car loan, the insurance premiums and the grocery bills and have good enough credit to borrow for a vacation, we don't want to rock the boat.

Most of us are trapped by the pension system, too. People stick at a job for no other reason than that they've already been at it for eighteen years.

“Three more years, Andy,” a friend said to me the other day. “Just three more years and I'm getting out of here. I can't wait.”