The people of France love their cars as much as Americans do, and maybe more. Driving is an essential part of the French experience and, if you don’t worry too much about your own survival, a great pleasure too. This means that we must have a car in France, which in turn means that every time we go there we pay a small fortune to a rental company.

Last year we decided to buy our own vehicle. But we have a problem about where to store it. The village, laid out some seven hundred years ago, was never designed for easy parking. There is a sort of garage under the house, a vaulted stone space where animals were kept in the old days. But the entrance is narrow, and so is the street. Only a very small car can get in. After several experiments with borrowed cars, which greatly entertained the neighbors, we had the essential information. The very, very tiny Citroen belonging to the baker would fit. A car larger than this by more than two centimeters in any dimension would not fit.

So we were in the market for a very small, very old, very cheap car. If you know anything at all about cars you know that this is not a good combination of requirements. Small cars tend to be more flimsily constructed than larger models, and they wear out faster. The owners of small cars are usually not rich, and so may be tempted to skimp on the maintenance until the vehicle begins to show signs of trouble and some idiotic foreigner can be persuaded to buy it.

We entered the French used car market in a suspicious mood: Caveat emptor. We had no intention of falling for some fanciful tale about an old lady who used this car only once a week to drive to the Catholic Church. For one thing the Catholic Church is at the top of a steep hill, the kind of hill that chews up clutches, brakes, and gearboxes. For another, old ladies in France all seem to have the repressed desire to be Formula One drivers.

At least there was plenty of choice of small cars. For the past half century the French automobile industry has been producing mainly compact cars, partly because of the outrageous price of gasoline, and partly because the towns and villages are full of narrow streets with limited parking space. People with big egos do buy big cars to impress their neighbors, but they can never find a place to park and have to keep moving, like the Flying Dutchman. The most popular models are, by American standards, not much more than motorized skate boards, and are colloquially called bagnols, or bath tubs.

The first step in French car buying, we discovered, was to watch the traffic. Cars for sale carry signs in their windows advertising the fact. You can run after them and speak to the owner when they park, or stop at a stop sign, not than anybody does stop at stop signs. My wife became very good at chasing down likely-looking vehicles and interrogating their owners. She had an amazing turn of speed, which most of these cars did not.

In the first week we had narrowed down our search to half a dozen makes and bottom-of-the-line models, none of them longer that 340 cm or wider than 150. Forget about color and style. We cruised around the local car dealers, learning a lot of arcane automotive vocabulary in the process, and shaking some greasy hands. One of the nice things about French car dealers was their indifference. You could wander about in the lot or showroom for as long as you liked without being bothered with sales talk. Even if you did find a sales person, he or she would just answer questions and then leave you alone. It could make car buying almost a pleasure.

But these tiny cars didn’t inspire much confidence and, frankly, neither did the people selling them. We’re waiting for that magic moment that happens in every French romantic film, when suddenly across a crowded car lot you see the one you love, and she is exactly the right size.

Copyright: David Bouchier

Bastille Day is a big national holiday. It commemorates the rebellion in Paris on July 14, 1789, when a mob of citizens threw open the gates of the hated Bastille prison and released a rather disappointing total of seven political prisoners. This was the beginning of the French revolution, and the beginning of modern France. This mid-July weekend is also the peak time for vacation traffic. From now until the end of August, the south of France is absolutely full, standing room only.

I’ve often felt that the French really enjoyed their revolution, chaotic and anarchic though it was. They have never quite got over it. You can tell by the way they drive and park that the spirit of anarchy is not dead. Evading government regulations is practically a patriotic duty. And there’s a fierce patriotism that appears on occasions like Bastille Day that makes a foreigner feel just a bit out of place.

France seems almost like home to us, after many visits to the same village. The streets, the stores, the cafés, the people, and the cats have become part of our daily lives, although we have never figured out more than a fraction of what is going on. Even the opening and closing times of the general store have remained a mystery. But our neighbors are entirely welcoming, strangers are friendly and helpful, we have never felt rejected.

Yet this is the worst year for Franco-American relations since the Louisiana Purchase. L’affaire DSK has injected some extra poison into what was always a fraught relationship. Yet French popular culture was and is obsessed with American themes. Even the distinguished left-wing newspaper Le Monde crams its pages with reviews of American novels, movies and art. That’s why French journalists and intellectuals agonize over the problem of foreign influence, and the question of French identity.

In my opinion, they have plenty of identity, almost too much. Nobody can be French like the French, or remind you so often that you are not French, which they see as a misfortune rather than a fault. But there are some disturbing trends. It’s not just movies and McDonalds, but the fact that the most deeply valued part of France, the French heartland or la France profonde, has become part of the global real estate marketplace.

It’s a pattern repeated all over Europe in attractive villages like this one. Newcomers buy and refurbish the romantic old village houses. The original inhabitants, especially the young ones, want nothing more than to move out to a nice villa in the suburbs, or to the nearby city. These migrations create what I call the anachronistic village: church bells and satellite dishes, traditional families living in poverty right next to wealthy professionals from Paris, Berlin, and New York. If you look into the street level windows of the medieval houses you might see an old lady knitting in her rocking chair. But you are just as likely to see the glowing icon of Windows 7. In places like Provence, some of the prettier villages have been more or less completely colonized by outsiders. Ancient stone houses built by and for peasants have acquired proper plumbing, air conditioning, and high-speed Internet connections. The paradoxes multiply.

Where does this leave traditional French culture? The answer seems to be: fighting an energetic rearguard action, and winning, at most of the time. I don’t think we need to worry that our temporary presence here has polluted the pure stream of French culture. French culture can take care of itself.

Copyright: David Bouchier

Summer reading is one of those traditional pleasures, like family fun, that exists largely in the realm of fantasy. You could say of summer reading what Mark Twain said about the weather: that everybody talks about it but nobody does anything about it. The decline of reading in general is well documented, and serious reading is in free fall. But the paradox is that as reading declines the number of books continues to expand relentlessly. The paradox is even more apparent at this time of year when the newspapers and magazines hit us with their “Summer Reading Supplements,” each one thicker and more daunting than the last. One, from a fairly well known New York newspaper, was thirty-seven pages long and reviewed or recommended over a hundred books. How long do the editors think summer is?

If it makes you feel any better I can tell you that it is even worse in France. The summer book supplements are heavier, more intellectual, and much more daunting. A survey in March came up with the heretical finding that a substantial majority of French people actually believe that books are better than the Internet.

This raises an intriguing question: in what sense if any are books better than the Internet? I love books because I prefer to live in the past, but I know that computers and portable devices can deliver the same information and entertainment, usually faster and often cheaper. So why bother with a clumsy, old-fashioned technology that is four thousand years old and uses up an alarming number of our vanishing trees?

To answer this unwelcome question I did some research. This consisted of sitting in the room where I usually work, staring at the computer screen for a few minutes, and then revolving on my chair to look at the books on the walls.

The answer, when it came, was obvious. There is just one computer, and potentially it can bring me most of the knowledge in the world. That’s the thing, “potentially.” There are a few hundred books, and they are here already, in the room. Some I have read and some I haven’t, but they are here. And by being here as solid physical objects they remind me of all the things I don’t know, but should. Here, for example, is a thick book, by Alex Ross about twentieth century music called The Rest is Noise. bought months ago and not yet read. It is almost seven hundred pages long. Would I pull up seven hundred pages of text on the computer to learn Mr. Ross’s opinions about twentieth century music? Not likely. The blank computer screen is totally forgiving, it lays no guilt on me for my laziness. But the book will sit there glaring at me until I read it. Likewise the huge Encyclopaedia Brittanica volumes in the library, in their black and gold bindings, are a constant reminder that I know almost nothing about anything. When it comes to ignorance your friendly, undemanding computer is a co-conspirator, an enabler.

It may be, let’s hope, that the economic recession will lead to a reading boom, as happened in the 1930s. After all reading is the most economical and most engaging form of escapism. There are a lot of clever young novelists writing these days, and some wonderful history books are being published. Now as never before we need to understand history before we are swamped by its repetition. Recently at the library I have had to wait in line to check out my books. This has never happened before, and it must surely be a good sign. If we ever lose our books we will lose our guilt about not reading books, and then what will become of us?

Copyright: David Bouchier

French psychoanalyst Pierre Bayard, author of How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, has done us all a great service. I haven’t actually read his book, but I don’t need to. Just by writing it he has made duplicity respectable. I’ve already had several lively conversations about How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read with other people who haven’t read it. In an age when everything is speeded up and nobody has any leisure, this book is a therapeutic gift.

Right now I have an unread book on my mind, a daunting and impossible book, but I have to talk about it today. English majors will know immediately what I’m thinking about: Ulysses by James Joyce, because next Thursday Bloomsday.

Non-English majors may need a quick footnote here. Bloomsday is observed every June 16 in Dublin, Ireland, to commemorate the life of James Joyce and relive the events in his novel Ulysses, all of which took place on the same day in Dublin in1904. The name derives from Leopold Bloom, the main character in the novel, and June 16 was the Date of Joyce’s first walk with his, future wife, Nora Barnacle. So far, so simple.

Things get less simple when you try to read the book itself, which is seven hundred and eighty three pages long, including footnotes. Here’s the Cliff Notes version. The novel loosely follows the adventures of Ulysses from Homer’s Odyssey, with characters representing those in Homer’s epic. These characters explore various sites and happenings around Dublin such as a newspaper office, a brothel, a funeral, and public houses. Beyond this, the book is indescribable. Nothing is made easy for the reader. Joyce changes the order of events in the original story, uses stream of consciousness and other ‘modernist’ techniques, invents brand new words, and includes hundreds of obscure references. This is a novel that you have to read with several academic commentaries to hand, and indeed there are reading groups, clubs, and web networks whose members do nothing but slog through the pages of Ulysses. It’s a lifetime commitment.

I took my first shot at reading Ulysses back in the sixties, when I imagined that I wanted to be an intellectual. I reached about lunchtime on June 16, when Leopold Bloom visits the National Museum in Dublin, before deciding that being an intellectual just wasn’t worth it. A few years later I tried again, this time reading backwards from the end in the hope that the book would reveal its secret that way. No luck. Now I have Ulysses on my desk again, and I’ve been turning it this way and that, like a Rubick Cube, trying to grasp the reason for its extraordinary fame and influence. It’s amazingly clever, I can see that. But that’s all I can see, which no doubt is my problem.

A book so formidable may be worth the effort, no matter what, because you would get such a sense of satisfaction just from having read it. It would be one of those lifetime achievements to brag about, like climbing Everest or reading the whole of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. I have done one of those.

But is there any virtue in reading such a book? Does it tune up the brain, like Mozart’s music or Tom and Ray’s puzzlers on “Car Talk”? Or can it, as I rather suspect, bring on the mental equivalent of a computer crash? Blue screen, fatal error.

In case you find yourself in Dublin on June 16 the things to do, in case you were wondering, are to dress in period costume, walk around Dublin, stop in the historic pubs, and of course (this is the hard part) read the book.

Copyright: David Bouchier

There are good reasons to be nervous about traveling these days. We share the roads with drivers who are absorbed in phone calls or texting, and perhaps enjoying some kind of drug experience into the bargain. When we take to the skies we are at the mercy of mad shoe bombers, underwear bombers and soon, we are warned, bombers who actually hide explosives inside their bodies. That will really slow things down at the airport check-in.

But I hate the idea of being stuck in one place. The environmentalists are right of course when they say that pointless travel and tourism are eating up the planet. We could use the ecological argument to stay at home and avoid all the worries. But, inevitably, we head for the airport and join the huge crowd of other people who have made the same irrational and probably immoral choice.

If we human beings were sensible creatures we wouldn’t travel at all; in fact we would never have left our cozy homes in Africa a hundred thousand years ago. The risks of something going wrong on a long journey are enormous. One Christmas we took perfectly straightforward trip to France by way of England. It involved flights, of course, a Paris taxi which is a high-risk venture in itself, several trains, and a rented car. Plenty of things went wrong, including winter storms on both sides of the Atlantic, the breakdown of the cross-channel train service, and transportation strikes in France. But we finally arrived safely at our destination, after a nerve-racking cross-country drive in darkness and blinding rain with an unfamiliar car. Obviously there had been nothing to worry about.

In the past few years a whole industry has grown up to exploit our fear of travel. We get a catalog for anxious travelers that offers solutions to problems we never even knew we had, including masks to protect against real or imagined viruses, several kinds of antibacterial hand cleaners including some that work with ultraviolet light, and even an antibacterial seat cover to put over your aircraft seat in case your body rests where some alien body might have rested. Fear of pollution outweighs even the fear of looking ridiculous. The same catalog has emergency radios, first aid kits, drugs, health products of many types including portable air purifiers, and all kinds of devices to protect the anxious traveler against foreign bathrooms. It doesn’t make travel seem like much fun, and I suppose it isn’t if you worry about all these things. Robert Louis Stevenson said that to travel hopefully was better than to arrive. But that was in the 1870s, before we were scared into to traveling with gritted teeth and a bag full of emergency products, fretting about the next disaster.

Yet travel was never as safe or reliable as it is now. Before airplanes came along untold numbers of people perished at sea in storms and shipwrecks. The Titanic was just one in a long line of transatlantic shipping disasters. Travelers were (and still are) taken by pirates, caught in train wrecks, kidnapped by bandits, starved, or simply lost and never found. The horrors of old-time travel have been well documented and exhaustively exploited by Hollywood. Yet people still traveled in spite of it all, and not just explorers and adventurers like Odysseus or Columbus. After tourism became fashionable in the eighteenth century the world set out to see the world, no matter how uncomfortable and dangerous it might be. Their robust spirit should be an inspiration to all of us as we wait, rather nervously, in the airport security line.

Copyright: David Bouchier

Part of our eternal fascination with the weather is that we can do nothing about it, least of all predict it. The arbitrariness of the weather led our ancestors to assume that it was sent by capricious gods to annoy or punish mere mortals, or perhaps just for entertainment. This theory has persisted for thousands of years, and I’m inclined to believe it. Weather forecasting, in spite of satellites and computers and sophisticated modeling techniques, remains almost as fallible as stock market forecasting. The weather will do what it will do, sending us from sub-zero to springtime warmth in a day or two, as happened last week in New York.

Winter here is full of surprises, mostly nasty ones. It keeps us off balance. The only good thing I can find to say said about our erratic weather is that it protects us against political enthusiasms. If you don’t believe me, watch the television news every night for a week (Public Television of course). You will see a lot of political action all around the world. Most of this action consists of young men rioting, setting fire to things, waving machetes, looting stores firing guns in the air, and generally behaving badly. The scene is so familiar that we tend to glaze over. Where is this particular riot happening? Who can tell? All we can say for sure is that the participants are never wearing overcoats or fur hats or snow boots, never. They are very casually dressed, as if for the beach, and this is because they are warm. They are in the tropic zone, somewhere between latitudes twenty north and twenty south.

Even in more moderate latitudes a period of warm weather can spell trouble. The Paris police, for example, will not go into certain suburban areas on very hot days. But the warmth doesn’t last long, that’s the important thing. Nineteenth century social philosophers took it for granted that climate affected behavior. Because they knew nothing about political correctness they referred to the “Warm blooded races” of the tropics. Now we understand that blood and race have nothing to do with it – it’s warm weather that causes the trouble. Hot weather cultures are different from cold weather cultures, politically speaking – and it seems obvious why.

This country has its own political thermometer. South of Mason Dixon politics tends to become more extreme, and dirtier (think Florida in 2000 and 2004, not to mention Texas and Louisiana). Between latitudes 30 North and 30 South people don’t seem to have much use for terms like liberal, progressive, tolerant, or broadminded. They are drawn to absolutes. It’s unfortunate that the federal capitol is in Washington DC and not where it started in Philadelphia. Those long hot summers in DC overheat the blood even of politicians from Maine and North Dakota. They lose perspective. They forget about the uncertainty principle, and they begin to think in terms of absolute truths.

Nobody can sustain political faith, let alone enthusiasm, through a northern winter. The weather reminds us every day of uncertainty, fate, misery, and death. This gives us a cranky, negative disposition, a disinclination to believe anything, especially political manifestos, and weather forecasts. The cold, and the anticipation of it, cools our passions all the way down to freezing point. We hate outdoor demonstrations.

Steady warmth, by contrast, is inflammatory. It promotes outdoor activities like mass protests, and riots, and it releases an enormous amount of energy – the energy that we northerners use on scraping windscreens, shoveling snow, and simply avoiding hypothermia.

If my theory is correct (that moderate temperatures promote moderate politics and vice versa) we have many things to be thankful for, not least that the southern tip of Florida falls just short of the tropic line, although only just.* Goodness knows what they might get up to down there if they had another couple of degrees of southern latitude. We should also consider the possibility – once again if my theory is correct – that the effort to plant liberal democracy in the blazing hot Middle East has less chance than a snowball planted in a similar place.

*Note: Key West lies at 24.55°, and the tropics begin at 23.5°

Copyright: David Bouchier

The English language is constantly changing, but not necessarily improving. In theory every new word or usage enriches the language in some way. How could we communicate today without verbs like “to Google” or “to outsource,” or adjectives like “supersize”? But, all too often, new terms simply push out the old without raising the quality of our English at all.

The fad for political correctness in the late twentieth century turned a lot of our language into mush. Old people vanished and reappeared as “senior citizens,” stupid kids metamorphosed into the “educationally challenged,” drug addicts mysteriously turned into “substance abusers,” and so on. You’ve heard this all before, but it really matters because language matters. If we talk like phonies we will inevitably begin to think like phonies. “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity,” wrote George Orwell, nailing the problem with his usual precision. Euphemistic, misleading, evasive, and just plain silly language now comes at us from every part of the political spectrum, and from business too. When we had to buy some curtains for our house I was amazed to discover that simple curtains were no longer available. We had to purchase “window treatments,” although they looked exactly like curtains to me.

The weasel word that’s aggravating me at the moment is “issues.” Whenever somebody is being difficult, or unreliable, or neurotic, their behavior is excused with the phrase: “Oh, he (or she) has a lot of issues.” This slippery term can also be used self-referentially, as in: “I have issues with that,” or even diagnostically, as in: “He can’t move ahead until he deals with his issues.”

Now “issue” in old English meant a number of things: the act of coming out, or an exit, or the label for a child in relation to its parents, or the act of publishing or distributing something, or a position taken in a legal case or a political dispute. I imagine that it is this last meaning that has been seized upon and made into nonsense by people who talk about “having issues.”

Issues are big problems or conflicts. Israel and Palestine have issues, President Bush and Senator Kerry have issues, Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the rebel leader Guy Phillipe have issues. Most of us don’t have issues worthy of the name; we have complaints. I have numerous complaints, as listeners to this commentary know all too well: about computers, international politics, plastic bags, household chores, and squirrels on my bird feeders, amongst many other things. But none of them qualifies as an “issue.”

Nobody likes to admit: “I’m a miserable, negative sort of person who is never satisfied.” But it sounds rather grand to say: “I have issues.” When I floated this topic in conversation I was earnestly told that “issues” are much more significant than mere complaints. “Issues” are the psychic scars left by a lifetime of pain and struggle – divorce, illness, death, failure and all the predictable traumas of modern life. Some people seem to nurture and treasure their unhappy experiences forever. Like the old Bourbon kings of France, they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. So, they have issues.

In the course of writing this I inevitably examined my own character. I have been accused of having curmudgeonly tendencies, so perhaps I too have unresolved issues in my life. This would be rather fun, because I could join in the whining chorus about “issues” and feel that I am, once again, on the cutting edge of the English language.

I don’t buy it. Let’s call things by their proper names. We all have complaints, pet peeves, discontents, irritations, disappointments, resentments, bad memories, gripes, grievances, grouches, grudges, and grumbles. We all enjoy being petulant, peevish, whining curmudgeonly, and querulous from time to time. The English language is rich enough to express every good or bad thing that ever happened to anybody. We don’t need “issues.”

Copyright: David Bouchier

The sight of the first bride in springtime always gives me a lump in my throat, and brings tears to my eyes. It must be some kind of allergy. She was climbing into a block-long white limousine outside a big church in Charleston and, because this was in the south, and in a very expensive area, the bride and the guests were all beautifully dressed. The bridegroom paid no attention to his new bride, as she struggled to get her billowing white gown into the limo. He was engrossed in the fancy video camera being used by the professional photographer to record the moment for posterity.

It must be quite a moment. I’ve never been a bride, but it must be as good as a starring role on Broadway, with the added advantage that she doesn’t have to repeat the performance every evening, plus matinées.

Big weddings, like exotic vacations, exist primarily to be photographed. They also provide an opportunity for the two families to get together and take the measure of each others’ weaknesses. Divorced parents can square off for another round, and the members of different religions can confirm all their favorite prejudices. Wedding receptions end with fights surprisingly so often that some wedding planners hire security guards. It’s a high-risk event for all concerned. But nobody seems deterred by that, or by the divorce rate, or by popular television programs like “Desperate Housewives.” Nor do the brides seem worried by the fact that everyone says that the wedding will be the high point of their lives. Who wants to hit the high point so soon? I’m still looking forward to mine. Sometimes brides do realize this and run away, like the woman who hit the headlines when she vanished just before her wedding in Duluth. But I suppose a lot of people run away from Duluth, with or without the threat of a wedding.

I always feel sorry for the bridegrooms. They are symbolically necessary but functionally useless. The bridegroom is an extra, in the Hollywood sense, and I think a lot of them feel this rather painfully. Their job is to dress right for once, say their lines properly, and not get too drunk. Men shouldn’t be required to go to their own weddings. They’d be happy just to get a note in the mail after the event.

A wedding is an important ritual, of course, but rituals easily degenerate into mere performances. In a big wedding production, something profoundly personal becomes showily public, and even theatrical. The main performers are helpless in the grip of the wedding machine, so carried along by the script and the staging that they can scarcely resist.

I can’t produce any statistics to prove it, but I suspect that small, intimate weddings, where the bride and groom invite only those people they really want to see (which may be nobody) give couples a better start than those big staged events that cost on average twenty thousand dollars, and set up impossible expectations. The most spectacular example was the multi-million dollar nuptial extravaganza of Charles and Diana in 1981, which led to nothing but misery.

The small wedding fits with the nature of modern marriage, which is more personal and less social than it used to be – and shorter. You don’t have witnesses and a great big party when you sign a car lease contract, even though a standard car lease runs longer than many marriages.

Men, with their less developed social brains, can understand and participate in a small wedding in ordinary clothes. A modest wedding, religious or non-religious, takes the pressure off both parties, and allows them to think about each other. Also, if they do divorce soon after, it’s much less embarrassing. Our wedding was very small, and I couldn’t be happier with the resulting marriage, now heading for its quarter century. If anyone had proposed a white limousine, a tuxedo, and a catering hall, I’d still be a bachelor.

Copyright: David Bouchier

The desire to make things clean and tidy in the springtime seems to be an almost biological urge. Like most biological urges, it should be resisted. Spring may be the season of renewal and new beginnings, but there’s no point in going mad about it. The energy and optimism we feel at this time of year shouldn’t be wasted on cleaning.

Only a few hundred years ago spring was a season of joy and happiness, music and dancing, not domestic labor. The Romans had a great festival in honor of Flora the goddess of springtime and low-cholesterol and, in primitive countries like England, the annual spring ritual would be the Maypole Dance, in which young virgins, youths and maidens, would dance around on the village green, holding long ribbons attached to the top of a pole. As they circled the ribbons would wind around and get shorter and shorter until the dancers were all very close together. Obviously, this sort of thing couldn’t be allowed in these puritanical days, even if we could find young persons qualified to take part.

Naturally there were accidents during the celebrations – drunken falls, heart attacks, and inappropriate liaisons. Nobody cared much about that. But now we have legal liability, and political correctness, and the health police. A bit of wild partying can easily land you in court. The maypole dance might get you sued for discrimination against the disabled, or the merely dizzy. Excessive drinking will lead to huge medical bills. It’s safer to stay home and tidy the closets.

Another dismal modern phenomenon is what we might call springtime double jeopardy. Not only are we expected to clean, we are also expected to diet. In fact the quest for domestic order is very like dieting. It’s easy to achieve some short-term success, but almost impossible to maintain it. We are seduced by the many forms of disorder, just as we are seduced by the infinite varieties of food. The habits of a lifetime are just that – the habits of a lifetime.

I feel the tug of the spring-cleaning disease myself, but only very faintly like the gravitational pull of a distant star. I never have any trouble ignoring the symptoms. In fact I can allow my mind roam over the many possibilities that present themselves to my imagination as the weather improves. There’s outside painting, of course, and some power washing would be a good idea. The bird feeders need cleaning, the garage is a mess, my car is a disgrace, and there must be a hundred small odd jobs waiting for me to attack them with a hammer, or a chainsaw or a screwdriver, or a power drill. I have a lot of tools in the garage, because I like tools. But I don’t like using them, in case they wear out.

The good news is that there are more and more specialized services out there to take over these tasks and allow us to enjoy our lives. Domestic cleaning is a whole industry, and even the traditional handyman is back in the form of a franchise operation. Thousands of “professional personal organizers” are poised to sort out our messy paperwork for about $200 an hour. It’s only a matter of time before we can look forward to dieting services – offering a range of large people who will lose weight on our behalf.

But the best and cheapest solution to springtime madness is just to wait it out. Once the weather gets really warm all these labors will become humid and unpleasant, the great outdoors will pull us away from domestic concerns, and weight loss will come as nature intended: through exercise, heat exhaustion, and plenty of sweat.

Copyright: David Bouchier

President’s Day gives us a three-day weekend, which pleases everybody. But there’s so much to plan and to remember – the sales, the bank closings, the hotel bookings, the discount ski-tickets, and so on – that the Presidents themselves are usually forgotten. They were rather special Presidents. We don’t have a national holiday for Chester Alan Arthur, or Grover Cleveland. But the banks close and the sales open for Washington and Lincoln.

George Washington was commander in chief of the Continental army during the revolutionary war, a leader of the insurgency in modern terms, and the first president of the United States. Abraham Lincoln was the sixteenth President, who really made the mythical journey from log cabin to White House, and was elected President at just about the worst moment in the history of the United States. He preserved the Union and ended slavery, although not everybody was happy about those achievements at the time.

Everyone agrees that these were two men of heroic stature. The word “hero” has a strange, archaic ring, but we know what it means. “A brave, illustrious or much admired figure,” says the dictionary. We have a tendency to create instant heroes these days, but in the past heroes had to wait until some time after they were dead before getting their accolade. The same applied to “great statesmen” or “immortal composers.” These were essentially postmortem honors, because living people could never live up to them, and in any case they would be embarrassing.

True heroes exist only in history. The strange alchemy that turns mortal men into immortal heroes is a process of forgetting. Neither Washington nor Lincoln would have any chance of being elected to the Presidency today, or even to the local school board. Washington, with his grim unsmiling face and his austere character would be an image-maker’s nightmare. Lincoln, with his complexity, his ambiguity, and his alarming habit of speaking unwelcome truths in complete sentences, would never make it past the first primary.

Washington, in his own time, was a highly controversial figure. He was the richest man in America, and was widely mistrusted by farmers and ordinary working people. He was accused of running a “Republican Royal Court” in his first Presidential term, and his foreign policy was so unpopular that it caused riots in the streets.
Lincoln, of course, was feared and despised by half the population at the time of the Civil war. Nobody was more vilified or caricatured. Much of the press was hostile to him, and he was accused of tyranny, arrogance, and fraud. Both great men were intimately involved with what was politely called “The Indian Removal.”

But that was all in the distant past, and time has done its soothing work. Nothing is more reassuring than the past. It comes to us already edited, like a movie. We know the plot and we can rerun it again and again. George Washington will always win the battle of Yorktown. Abraham Lincoln will always save the Union in the last reel. It’s not like the morning TV news, when anything can happen and heroes are created and destroyed between commercial breaks.

We owe it to future generations to provide them with real heroes on the historic scale – men and women who were truly brave, illustrious, and admired. Our great-great grandchildren in the twenty-second century will look back to our times for such larger-than-life characters, and such satisfying stories of the triumph of good over evil. They may not be obvious to us today, but we don’t have to worry about that. History will reveal them. That’s what history is for.

Copyright: David Bouchier