Prayer of a Proud and Good Enuf Mama

Dear God,

Thank you for listening, if you are. I have a lot of lifelong questions about that, but I've been reading this book about the twelfth century Abbess Hildegard lately, and I guess you could say I'm writing this under her spell.

I have come to you today to ask for your assistance. Vanity and boastfulness threaten to overwhelm me, and I need someone to properly humble my inappropriately soaring ego. No one has ever proved better at undermining human ego than you, so even though it's been years since I last prayed, I suspect you've been gleefully marking time: That omniscient aspect of you.

My trouble is not, please understand, that I've become vain about myself. No. You took care of that decades ago, when you dispatched me from nothingness into being, a grossly imperfect being complete with overbite and stick straight hair and a figure, once I was old enough to think of having one, to match. I was not even vain about my intelligence, which for some peculiar reason you chose to grant me, peculiar since within the circle of my middle class family I was unlikely, especially since I was created female, to ever fully use it. No. I was raised to be just "good enough." When I won an award for scholastic excellence, I shredded it on the way home. When my first poem was published, it was published under my best friend's name. There was no sense calling attention to oneself. Good enough was the goal. Throughout Scandanavia, where "good enough" is still a way of life, they even have a special word for it: "Jante." In the north central states of the US, which are full of Scandanavians, Jante is practically a way of life. Which may be part of my problem today.

You see, I have extraordinary children. Large children. I mean, they're actually young grown-ups. They can out run me, out argue me, even out think me. Very vexacious if extraordinary creatures they are, both of them, and I am having a heck of a time not bragging about them, of becoming one of those irritating adults who live through their children, who act like their children's accomplishments are their own.

Some parents start this the first time their toddler bobbles out onto the soccer field and keep on advancing in a linear formation all the way through the high school graduation where the now grown toddler was almost certainly bypassed for the valedictory address just because she had once gotten the better of the advisor in a debate on whether to initiate an open campus; she really should have had top honors but for her perfect character.

But I am trying to hold out. I was at a large dinner party a few weeks ago, in a big old house full of interesting adults with satisfying careers come together from all parts of the globe to enjoy each other's company. And it was great until about ten o'clock, when someone started bragging about their progeny. Then someone else had to chime in. Then someone else. Then someone turned to me and asked brightly, "Aren't your kids doing something amazing?"

I blinked. Yes. Both of my kids are doing many amazing things I would never have had the ability or the courage to do when I was their age (or since). But I don't want to spend my own precious life talking as if it is their lives that matter, not my own. It diminishes me and it diminishes my responsibility for living my own life to its fullest and best. I blinked and said, "I'm sorry. I have to leave now."

Raising my children is without a doubt the best and most fulfilling occupation I have known, but if I did not hope to do something equally wonderful and good with the rest of my life, wouldn't that be like giving up? My children's lives do not validate my own. And yet, when one of my kids calls me to tell me the next incredibly wonderful accomplishment of their life, I want to broadcast it to the world, in a way that I do not care about broadcasting the accomplishments of other equally wonderful young people. It really does feel as good as if I did it myself. But I didn't. They did it.

God, this is surely empty vanity. It is not quite as shallow as deriving a sense of personal satisfaction from the championship of a professional sports team maybe, since my children do at least have my own DNA and my imprint on their successes, but it is empty. We each need to live our own fullest, best lives. We need to lead lives so full of excellence that our own children are tempted to brag about us. We need to set that constant example, all the way through. It's so easy when we hit middle age to let our children live for us. But we still matter. The world and our children still need us to accomplish wonders, too: To be wonderful still.

Let me lead that life, God. Help me to be as fine as my own children. Let me not rest in smugness, boasting of them. Funny. As I was writing this, one of my kids called and told me about a really great compliment received on some work. I have never felt happier. Thank you for listening.

Amen.

That Little Round Person Without Sleeves or Dreams in Mississippi

In the state of Mississippi, where boys are sometimes grown African American men and men may be men even though they have names like Bubby and Lynn and Shelby, the government is considering a constitutional amendment that would identify a fertilized egg as a legal person.

I've been thinking about the ramifications and meaning of this ascertainment, as well as how one, let alone a legislative majority, might either validate or repudiate this idea. It occurs to me that the idea flies in the face of certain basic and amazingly simple facts.

What are some of the most basic elements all persons share, even those in Mississippi. Well, people need oxygen, water, and food. I'd venture we need love, too, but I know people who might argue that, so I'll let that one go for now. We need, with extremely insignificant exceptions, clothing, either because of cold or sunburn, mosquitoes or modesty. We do not need cars. We need a sense of purpose -- world peace, raising peas, quilting bees or saving honey bees -- or at least some area of interest, be it car mufflers or cashmere mufflers, Katy Perry or Rick Perry. We need to feel like we make some little inkspot of difference in the world. We have thoughts, dreams, anxieties and hiccups.

Does any of this apply to a fertilized egg? Just what the heck is it that makes anyone think a fertilized egg is a PERSON? If it is

indeed a miniature and somewhat round version of a four limbed, twenty-digited person with the miraculous opposing thumb, we can safely assume that the good ole boys (Harmon and Horton and Beauregard) are going to immediately curtail the right of any person within the state's borders to do anything that keeps it from maturing into another poorly educated southerner with lamentable job opportunities, but what other rights does this microscopic round person without clothing or dreams or hiccups then have? If this is a person, does a pregnant woman on welfare immediately qualify for another ration of child support? Can the father claim another dependent on his income tax even before the child is born? Or is the right to be born the only right this legal person will have?

I think the state should watch out. There are a lot of aspects of personhood that are not being addressed here, and most of them have budgetary ramifications.

And these are my thoughts without even beginning to address the really serious issue here: the right of every woman to decide what happens to her body.

Waiting for God at the Audiologist's

I have been waiting a very long time. Originally, as a child, I was told God was already in the house. This was a lie. In the scheme of events that unfolded in the seventeen years I spent living in that home where God was not, this was not the biggest lie I was told, but it was fairly significant; I spent a lot of time talking to someone who wasn't even there. My younger sister had an imaginary friend named Jiffy who lived with us for a while, and she spoke quite freely to Jiffy until one day when my dad apparently ran over Jiffy in the driveway with the Ford station wagon, an irreparable deed that ended that conversation.

No one ran over God, though, and I spoke to God more than my teachers and three sisters and parents combined. God stayed up later. You could talk to God even when everyone else was asleep. In fact, that was my favorite time for the long, one way conversations that characterized talking with God. Because one didn't actually have conversations with God, no. One ranted, raved, cajoled; one pleaded, remonstrated, argued both sides convincingly and rendered both verdicts and appeals handily; one did one's best to dictate: After all, there was such ear-splitting silence when one stopped.

Sometimes I think this is why I

have tinnitus today. My ears are just fine, thank you, but I haven't had a moment of silence in over three years. This may be how God has chosen to come to me.

I thought of this today when I passed a group of about fifty people ranged on one of the outdoor stairways that flank our State Capitol building all around. One of them had almost certainly been a member of that now happily defunct touring group, "Up With People," because that is how they were arranged on the stairs and that is how they smiled as they sang. Really, no one should smile while they sing. It's sort of like peeing in the lake just because it's big and you don't personally know the children who are splashing nearby; it may seem inocuous, but it taints what is meant to be pure. Anyway, these people were waving large flag-like banners in a way that reminded me of the bizarre fact that rhythmic gymnastics are actually an Olympian event and they were singing as they smiled at me some line, one line over and over again: "His name is the highest name."

Before I was educated, I was naive. Before I was skeptical, I was, of course, totally optimistic. Before I was rational, I was a dreamer. I am still naive and optimistic and a dreamer, but I am also educated, skeptical and rational. But God has never been in the house. And so what do these smiling people on the Capitol stairway know that has so long eluded me after so many one-sided talk sessions and so many years of the mosquito buzzing in my ears?

The Occupation of a Lifetime

Everyone is occupying something somewhere right now. Wall Street, of course, where it began, though it'll be interesting to see what happens now that cold weather is about to hit New York City. Madison, Phoenix. Rome. London. Responses to the ongoing occupations of cities across the world have varied; where I live, as soon as three people exchanged

tweets using the word "occupy," the city designated a park for their use and set up portapotties; in Phoenix, when three dozen Occupiers gathered with signs, police poured out of vans wearing full riot gear and hauled a third of the Occupiers off to jail for trespassing.

To the best of my knowledge, everything the Occupiers are saying is true. Well, except for their claim that they are the 99 percent. What is true is that most of us have nothing. Most of us are not part of the one percent who own everything, including us. Our bank accounts are as empty as the U.S. Treasury. We are in debt over our ears, whatever that means. We are the nation. We don't talk to people who disagree with us. We speak in meaningless signage: No concealed weapons allowed in the building. Don't ask don't tell. We don't want to know what that lump is.

Winter's coming. Even protest takes a holiday in the summer months; we all need vacations. Last winter I froze on the pavement outside my state's Capitol. Now the zinnias in my garden are all hanging their heads bowed, their colors shamed into obscurity by last night's frost. It's winter, and the conservatives who own the utility companies and the oil rigs and the pipelines and the financial empires that mortgage these

industries to our detriment are turning up their thermostats and locking us out in the cold again. It's gonna be another long, cold season. And it's protest season again, it seems.

I just walked by the Occupiers' encampment, which was moved from the city-endorsed park to a more conspicuous and less comfortable location on the cement near the city center for obvious reasons of exposure. Until the Occupants set up camp here, this spot was among the

main hangouts of the homeless. Now they have been additionally displaced, by the Occupation Forces.

It's very hard to win at anything lately. And when I walk by the new site and do my best to scrutinize the Occupiers who are by some reports the vanguard of the populist future, the 99 percent, you know, I see no one who really looks like part of the American middle class, the economically and politically impoverished middle class which by my analysis is the real 99 percent, or at least perhaps the real 90 percent from whom we are still honestly waiting to hear anything besides what we have already heard from its representatives in the Tea Party of No Fine China.

Not My Brother Not My Sister But It's Me Oh Lord

My favorite souvenir from my trip to Egypt this summer is an empty bullet casing from a rifle, picked up from the cement of Tahrir Square. My second favorite souvenir is the homemade CD of Egyptian music given to me by a taxi driver whose singer I will never know but whose songs I can sing almost perfectly in Arabic after listening to it for nearly four months. After these two come the rugs and the jewelry and the bags and the scarves and the skirts and the shirts and the shoes and the books I bought. Well, someone had to support the economy this summer, and there was a noticeable dearth of tourists!

But what I would most liked

to have brought home with me was impossible to bring home. It was something in the air. It announced the morning and the evening. It filled the dawn and dusk with longing, with sadness and humility and acquiesence, with faith. It was, of course, the call of the muezzin, the call to prayer. If you have never heard it and if you're somewhere quiet, you should click on the link now, before you read any further. I can think of no piece of music that stirs the soul more deeply, no matter how loudly the parishioners in my father's congregation belt out, "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God."

I first heard the adhan, the call, at sunset a few hours after my arrival into Cairo. We had just had a wonderful meal in an open air restuarant overlooking Cairo's "Central Park," the big green space that is the best place to get an overview of the city, the 74 acres of Al Azhar Park, created over a garbage dump less than two decades ago. Dusk creeps up over the park from the densely populated city at its base. Dusk rises

around your ankles, like a fog. And the music of the adhan starts at one mosque, the rich and sonorous sustained notes of the statement of faith that is required of every Muslim, trailing down the narrow streets like a tendril of smoke calling the faithful to mind. One by one, the muezzin with the nearest, most powerful speaker is joined by the others. It is not synchronized. Each muezzin seems to have his own version of sunrise and sunset and the other three times set for prayer. It is not always entirely harmonic depending where you are. Remember: There are over 4,000 mosques in Cairo.

The words are a reminder to the faithful to pray, as well as a summation of the Shahada, the statement of faith. But the power of the adhan is the power of a lament. It is the voice of the individual, lost in the world, lost in the desert, and crying out for salvation. It is the voice of all those who seek God. That is the power of the adhan. Though it is the song and sound and heartbeat of Islam, it is also the voice in the wilderness who is Jewish, who is Christian, who is you and who is me. It is the truth of our fundamental, inexorable aloneness in the world, and our fundamental yearning to be gathered in some

expression that can redeem this plight. The plaintiveness of the call reveals what no sermon ever does, that our faiths are based in our loneliness and in our desire to find the "oneness" hidden therein.

And what better than music, the most universal voice, which needs no language but a single note drawn across the night air on some stringed instrument no culture has yet given a name.

There is an old church of some lost and undefined denomination a block from my house. It's a community center now, where the elderly play games and eat hot meals, where the homeless can usually find a spare loaf of bread fresh from the neighborhood's several bakeries. Daycare and after school care fills the building and its small playground with children. It has a small square tower untopped by any religious symbol, and it is here I would like to plant a speaker to broadcast the call to prayer over my neighborhood.

How does that spiritual go? "It's me, it's me, it's me, oh Lord, standing in the need of prayer." Who does not?

The Jobs Left Behind For Us

It seems like everyone has some kind of reason for feeling a sense of sadness over the death of Steve Jobs this week. This includes me. If you're a writer, this means you have to write about it. So here is my bit of writing on it. It is part of the responsibility of being a writer, part of the things we carry.

Steve Jobs was 56 years old. He was rich and successful. He did not have great hair but he had a great smile and this counts for a lot more. He was 56 years old, and he died of cancer. It seems quite unnecessary to state these facts as every news source in the world has covered the story this week, and over 9 million people have clicked on the YouTube of the commencement speech he gave at Stanford six years ago when he thought he had beaten pancreatic cancer.

I wish 9 million more people would listen to the speech he gave then. It was great. I want my kids to listen to it. I want to go back to my office and retrieve the memo I dropped into recycling today, the one with the phone number of the mother of one of my students who was going to have a brain tumor removed and who was worried about how he was going to manage to graduate "on time" now that the neurosurgeons said he wouldn't be able to do anything academic for the rest of this term. I want that student to listen to it and his mother, too. I wish my friend who abandoned the work he loved twenty years ago because it required him to be on the road and he chose to be home with his children would listen to it. I hope you will listen to it, if you haven't yet. It's nice that you're reading my blog; it might change your life to listen to Steve Jobs.

On campus today, there was a new batch of chalkings. Chalkings is a new social media. Overnight, legions of students come out with buckets full of chalk probably salvaged from their parents's garages, leftovers from their recently abandoned careers as children, and get busy inscribing huge pastel-colored messages on the university's sidewalks. This week's messages were a little different than most, though; they did not advocate joining any social or religious organization nor even a fraternity. They did not recommend a vote for anyone on any ballot but the divine's.

Today's scrawlings said simply: "Stay hungry. Stay foolish." This is the concluding advice Jobs gave the Stanford graduates in his address. It came from the cover of the final edition of what Jobs described as the "Google of the sixties," the Foxfire compendiums.

I am not a Mac user. I don't own an iPhone or an iPad, and I just sent my iPod to my son because I wasn't using it enough to justify keeping it when he would use it daily. I am not interested in computers, and I think the world might not be noticeably worse off if we didn't have the ability to look up every fact in every language at any moment instead of turning to those in our community and coming up with our own answers. And yet I am mourning Steve Jobs. I am mourning Steve Jobs because he set a very great example of what one person can do if he follows his heart.

Steve Jobs dropped out of college. Never finished even a Bachelor's degree. He dropped out because it was draining his parents' life savings. His parents never went to college either. He was fired from Apple. He started his own company. He started several. He had some ideas he wanted to pursue. He ate at the Hare Krishna's weekly "Chant with us, eat with us" table. He slept on the floor. It reminds me a little of JK Rowling scribbling notes that would become the Harry Potter saga on napkins in two-bit restaurants. Oh. I've never read any of the Harry Potter novels, either, and I'm kind of guessing I might feel sad when Rowlings eventually dies, too.

So why feel so sad about the passing of one man from the planet? Lots of good people die every day. Some of these good people get even fewer years than Jobs did. But Jobs knew he was dying. He knew it for nearly ten years, and he just kept right on doing his same old wonderful work, following his vision. Talking about the importance of doing work that you love. Talking about living each day as if it's your last day.

My mom died this year. That's a loss that kicks your feet out from under you; in many ways I'm still staggering around like a drunk without direction, howling at the moon that dares to spill its unperturbable light upon the surface of the lake behind my house like nothing has changed. My mom, like Jobs, knew she was dying, knew she had a very finite amount of time left on the planet, in her case, three years from diagnosis to death. I was with her when she got the diagnosis, and I was with her when her breath finally stopped. But until I listened to Jobs' Stanford speech I couldn't quite forgive what I blurted out absolutely without premeditation when we heard her diagnosis: "It's going to be the greatest experience of your life, Mom!"

That was a very strange thing to hear coming out of my mouth that day, and my mom was as shocked as I was to hear them. I would, in the next three years as I watched her suffer and dwindle, often rue the way words sometimes pour from me. But Steve Jobs makes me feel just a little bit better. He inspires me. He makes me think about what it is I should be doing on this planet for my one brief life here. There are not many people left who inspire us. There are not many people left who have both power and simplicity, wisdom and intelligence, conviction and belief. David Brooks captured some of Jobs' unique contributions to us in his column in the Times today. When we voted for Obama, we thought he might be another one of these rare public figures who had all this. That illusion is gone. He may not be corrupt, but he's been beaten. He's become ordinary. Ironically, after I came to this thought on a walk today, I returned to my comnputer to find a link to an Onion article saying much the same thing, having their own way with words.

Good night, Mr Jobs. Thanks for everything, including the work you left behind for us. I'll be tackling that assignment for the rest of my one wild and precious life now.

Feminism Is What Passes Between a Mother and a Daughter

When my daughter was in middle school and just starting to eye me suspiciously, aware of the fact that some day in the no longer unforeseeable future she might have something in common with me beyond our inexplicable fondness for American cheese and sweet pickles melted into a rolled up tortilla, she asked me, "Mom, why the hell do you call yourself a feminist?" She apparently, as she vouchsafed, had not yet experienced any sort of discrimination, nothing that limited her ability to enjoy her life and express her opinions and her talents to their fullest. Nothing, that is, except her feminist parent, who refused to answer this question until it was posed without the Dantean reference to the place that makes the Sahara feel like a fjord. I am of the generation that still believes that everything matters and, not least of all, the words we use.

Well, little girls do become recognizable as their mothers from certain angles, usually when the lighting is poor, and my daughter went away to college and majored in, of all things, Women's and Gender Studies. Or at least that is what she studied until engineering caught her eye, and she enrolled in a College of Engineering where at least five percent of the students were, like her, sometimes noticeably female. This summer, we were together

in Egypt. She'd been there since last year, teaching math and science to children in the desert; I came in large part because she was there. My life has not been the same since. Hers was never the same.

What does this have to do with the little girl who disavowed a need for feminism and the mother who still keeps "Passing the Equal Rights Amendment" at the top of her To Do list? Everything. Egypt is a country that has gone backward in terms of women's rights. During the reign of Hosni Mubarak, women have not only covered their heads, they have covered their arms and their legs; they have muffled their voices. It was part and parcel of the repressive regime. Indeed. Religious fundamentalism, in any color and any creed, consistently endorses and enforces the subjugation of women. Why?

Well, in the simplest analysis of all, to remove a little over half of the population from political relevance and engagement is to remove over half of any regime's possible enemies. This is an incredible accomplishment for any regime. It's like jailing half the population, without the administrative costs of building prisons or hiring prison guards. It's an analysis that has frankly not been acknowledged nearly enough in the obfuscation of trendier, more complex explanations.

Secondly, it trims the pool of the unemployed very nicely. If you can make it uncomfortable or (better yet) unfeasible for half the population to hold meaningful jobs, the statistics of joblessness, which are built from the figures of citizens actively seeking employment and not finding it, look significantly better. In Egypt, where unemployment is at 12% overall, 25% if you look at a more youthful cohort, it's pretty much imperative to keep women from actively seeking jobs and sending these percentages skyward. (The younger cohort includes noticeably more women, as younger women are far less likely to be married or in charge of childcare, especially since Egyptian moral law prescribes that a man provide an apartment and a living before he can propose marriage.)

Yet I would be inaccurate and foolish if I tried to persuade anyone, least of all myself, that women feel more oppressed and thwarted in Egypt than they do in the US. Even older women, who have lived in Cairo under Nasser and Sadat as well as during the reign of Mubarak seem, by and large, content with their hijabs and their long skirts and their lack of equal opportunity to be jobless.

These older women can remember, if you press them, miniskirts and capris. They can remember kissing in the park, drinking wine. They hang on to the careers they achieved back when it was a thrill to be female in the busy epicenter that was Cairo.

"Women are not made to do anything they don't choose to do," I heard over and over from men in Egypt this summer. "No one makes them cover themselves; it's their choice." But it is the men who tell you this. You don't get to speak to the women. Even in women's clothing stores, although a young woman will be the one who approaches you and pulls out long skirt after long skirt for your approval, when it comes time to pay, it will be a man who takes your money and men (they are never alone in Egypt) who watch every minute of the transaction between you and the young woman on the shop floor. "Shokran! Thank you!" you call out over your shoulder as you leave the shop with your packages, trying to see the sparkling young woman who helped you find just what you want despite the fact that your Arabic was pretty much limited to hello and goodbye. But she's busy, applying herself with equal energy to the next customer.

The two young men behind the cash register are slouching against the wall again and smirking as they survey the female customers with a sense of obvious privilege. You step out onto the crowded sidewalk and the mild Cairo evening feeling just a little bit violated.

One evening, my daughter and I were walking through a new part of the big city looking for an art gallery someone had mentioned to us. We had a street name but not much else and had been walking in what was starting to feel like circles. In a very narrow side street off the avenue we were walking for the third time, we caught the eye of what was almost certainly another mother/daughter duo, this one sitting on small stools outside what was probably the family business. They were watching us as we approached, and their eyes were friendly. We approached them and asked for directions. My daughter's Arabic is much better than mine.

Before they could answer, a man stepped in. He, like everyone we met, was nice. He extended himself in a way no man in any American city would, unless he was fresh off the airplane from some non-Western country. Soon he had not only answered our questions with an orchestra of hand motions and the usual three consultations with other men who paused nearby in anticipation of just these consultations; he walked us to our destination.

It's hard to complain when you get this kind of treatment. Riding in a cab through Cairo one day, I told the driver I liked the music he was playing. Without a second's hesitation, he popped it out and handed it to me. Another time, in another car, stuck in traffic, I said I was thirsty. "Oh. You want a drink?" Before I could demur, the driver had put the car into Park and hopped out to buy me a fruit juice at the little grocery at the corner. Neither driver would accept any money for their gifts.

But we were sad, my daughter and I, as we followed the quick steps of the man in the gallabiya to the street that would eventually give up the gallery to us. We looked back. The woman and her daughter were whispering and watching us.

How we would have loved to know what they were saying. How nice it would have been to have tea with them.

Sustaining a Non-Dismal World of Non-Drones

When you work in an academic department in a field of study which is popularly known as "the dismal science," you tend to look for even small signs of life with which you can counter that designation. You know: Undismal things. Things that hint of happiness or beauty, things that provoke curiousity or dreams. Things like a well-ironed shirt, for instance, on a customarily rumpled faculty member. Meeting a spouse who's a talented artist or finding out that the staid professor of Industrial Organization is a Flamenco dancer. Finding someone on Facebook, even if you wisely decline to friend him, discovering a fellow blogger. Or spotting an expensively framed portrait of the English philosopher Bertrand Russell on the wall in a faculty office.

Bertrand. I confessed to the professor in whose office I found the philosopher framed that I found Russell's work very dense and had never finished anything he'd written, even though I'd tried several times. He reached up behind the thick heavy volumes of Smith and Mas Colell and Varian and extricated a very thin paperback, Authority and the Individual. "Try this," he suggested. "It's from his lectures, and it's eminently readable."

I don't know if I will ever succeed in reading anything else of Russell's, but I am so enthralled by the analysis of our civilization in this slim volume I will certainly try again. Everything he discusses in these Reith lectures is relevant today. The lectures, delivered to large BBC audiences way back in 1948, did not anticipate a post 9/11 world, where the strong have become fearful and the weak bold. Russell did not see that the religion of capital would find itself in a horrifying round of Russian roulette, minus the now largely ineffectual Russians, minus the sense of gamesmanship inherent in roulette. Just spin the chamber and the twin towers fall down. Spin and Afghanistan's destroyed. Spin again and a plane crashes. Spin again and again and again; like the saying goes, "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind."

No one predicted the way political violence would find its way to the shores of the US, and the subsequent way terrorism became almost mundane, something we pretend to cope with every time we fly to Aunt Brunhilde's for a cousin's wedding, something so much a part of our life now we barely flinch for attacks that kill less than several score. Russell, lecturing in the WWII era, still manages to address nearly everything we're seeing now, even in this slimmest and simplest of his writings.

What he talked about then remains entirely relevant today. When he dicusses fear, one can imagine a shot of a weakly smiling George W Bush on the screen behind Russell's podium, as the towers came crashing down along with our sense of immunity. "If loyalty to (a national culture) is to be replaced by loyalty to (corporations) ...there is only one psychological motive which is adequate for the purpose, and that is the motive of fear of external enemies." We hear the thumping of military boots tromping onto the shores of Iraq. We see the recession being addressed by infusing capital into the very industry that precipitated the crisis, that bankrupted the American working class, without any real reform or regulation of their tactics.

Russell talks about how the individual siting in the world has developed from that of a tribal to a national to a lost soul, still in search of gratifications for our enduring need to explore and create and belong. Combat and war, he postulates, are the most extreme expression of our need to stake out our individual territory, to wager our lives on our physical and logistical superiority. To counter this impulse, Russell advocates something that is becoming familiar to our ears lately: smaller, decentralized economies.

"The instincts that long ago prompted the hunting and fighting activities of our savage ancestors demand an outlet; if they can find no other, they will turn to hatred and thwarted malice. But there are outlets for these very instincts that are not evil. For fighting, it is possible to substitute emulation and active sport; for hunting, the joy of adventure and discovery and creation." To promote these, Russell recommends what we have come to call in our own time, sustainable lifestyles.

Yes. In a postwar world obsessed with unparalleled industrialization (for was it not American manufacturing prowess that actually won the war?), Bertrand Russell is speaking to millions of rapt listeners over the waves of the BBC and telling them to invest in decentralized, local economies, to provide satisfying work for artisans and artists and intellectuals as a means to avert our fatal impulse to find adrenaline and challenge on the battlefield, satisfaction no longer accruing from our daily work routines. Engagement in our work, Russell says, satisfying our sense of individual importance and fulfillment in our communities, is the best means to take away the horrifying prospect of life as drones in the military industrial complex we've built.

What perhaps Russell could not anticipate in these lectures, was the fact that even warfare would become by the 21st century, automated and impersonal. Drones and missiles, armaments that fire over such a long distance in either blinding daylight or deepest midnight that battles can be won or lost without soldiers facing an enemy. Even warfare is becoming an alienated process. The combination of instinct and training that once developed leadership in soldiers on the field of combat has been replaced by a microphone and a computer chip embedded in their helmet, telling them where to look, where to fire, when to run. How much more do we need the shelter of work that engages, inspires and allows us to develop the initiative and creativity that is the best part of being human?

Well. Russell's lectures say it all much better. "We shall not," Russell concludes, "create a good world by trying to make men tame and timid, but by encouraging them to be bold and adventurous. and fearless except in inflicting injuries on their fellow-men." Everyone on my Christmas list is getting a copy of this book this year. I hope you get a copy, too.