Faith, defined a little too simply, is a belief one holds without evidence. Perhaps that definition sounds somewhat derogatory or appears to contain an implied rebuke. But people of all stripes have beliefs they cling to for no intellectually defensible reason, whether they be common superstitions (“Crime is more prevalent during the full moon” — it isn’t), personal idiosyncrasies (“Something good always happens to me when I wear my lucky sweater”) and even moral or philosophical precepts (“If I make a point of being trusting and kind, others will be encouraged to follow my example”). Most beliefs of this sort are quite harmless, a few are beneficial and the rest are a small price to pay for the freedom to be occasionally irrational. I think it would be a terribly dull world if everyone had a solid empirical basis for everything they did. Besides, I’d probably have to stop buying lottery tickets, and I like having something to fuel my daydreams.

The snag is that a belief held without evidence is also extremely resistant to change. Christopher Hitchens once said that anything that is claimed without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. That’s an intellectually justifiable position, but not a very satisfying one, at least not if you find yourself wrangling with someone whose judgement you otherwise respect about an issue you can’t agree on. Faith beliefs are felt in the gut; they accord with our sense of how the world operates and are the result of influences we are mostly unaware of, from our parents and families to the media messages we’re exposed to every day. Though I defend recreational irrationality, I don’t hold it as justification for never changing your mind. Resistance to evidence is usually rooted in fear: fear of admitting you may be wrong and feeling stupid, fear of having your worldview attacked, fear of having to start at square one in determining just what it is you believe. This kind of fear is unhealthy and ought to be stood up to, at least once in a while. So occasionally I undertake the mental exercise of determining what it would take to change my mind on an issue I care deeply about. Today’s issue: religion.

I am an atheist, and I am an atheist of a particular stripe: I do not believe in a god or gods. That is not the same as saying “there is no god.” The latter is a statement about the nature of reality, the former about one’s own knowledge and the limits thereof; another way of saying it might be “I have seen no evidence of a god.” This distinction is sometimes called “soft atheism” versus “hard atheism” (neither of which are to be confused with agnosticism, an oft-misused word that describes the belief that true knowledge of god’s existence or non-existence is unknowable by human standards). In practical terms, there is not much daylight between the two positions, and holders of either belief/nonbelief would be indistinguishable in how they lived their lives. The only difference is that one has come to a conclusion and the other hasn’t. In the spirit of jiggling a knife into that small chink in the armor of certainty, and in keeping with Carl Sagan’s dictum that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” here are the conditions I would require to renounce my atheism and adopt a belief in god.

1. I would require access to a secure room, shielded against any outside transmissions or energy sources. All illumination and video equipment (see below) would be portable and powered by batteries. The room would have no windows and one door to which I would possess the key.

2. Inside this room should be a table and three chairs, along with a tripod-mounted portable HD video recorder, thermographic sensor and a copy of Snooki’s beach read A Shore Thing. All items would have been purchased by me personally and kept in my possession until the experiment begins. The first chair is for me.

3. Joining me in this room would be an impartial observer of a non-Judeo-Christian faith, a person previously unknown to me whose mental health has been certified by an independent expert. (I am approaching this experiment from the point of view of a Christian because that is the faith I was raised in. It is a simple enough matter to imagine the process conducted from a differing point of view.) This man or woman would take the second chair.

4. I would then lock the door, commence recording and take my seat. The video camera would be set up to take a wide shot of the entire table and anyone sitting at it.

5. At some point following step 4, Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah whose coming was foretold in the Old Testament and reaffirmed in the New, must appear before me as he did in life (i.e., looking like a first-century Jew, not a pale-skinned hippie). When I say “appear,” I mean he must fully manifest himself as a corporeal being with weight and volume, capable of being perceived by all five human senses.  (I’m guessing a guy from the first century would not smell like a guy from the 21st.) I would employ the thermograph to make sure Jesus gave off an appropriate heat signature. His physical reality thus confirmed, Jesus and I would exchange pleasantries — I am assuming the language barrier represents no obstacle for the Son of Man, and would indeed be quite suspicious if he appeared in the flesh only to stare uncomprehendingly at me and babble in Aramaic — and he would take the third seat.

6. Jesus would then reveal three facts about myself that only I know. These would have to be of sufficient obscurity that they could not be discovered by any conventional means of research. It’s possible that Jesus and a team of investigators could find out, for example, that as a boy I was obsessed with the Sears Tower and once even had a small statue of it on my birthday cake. To demonstrate his divine nature, Jesus would have to reveal something on the order of, “You once had a nightmare in which you were exploring a construction site and a chimpanzee in a green Army shirt fired a laser pistol at you.” (That is true.) After three such revelations (that latter one no longer counts as it is now public), Jesus must then perform a small miracle: he must make the text disappear from the pages of A Shore Thing while leaving the book itself otherwise intact. As a final formality, I would ask Jesus to confirm that he is, in fact, the Son of God and that the stories of him in the New Testament are essentially true. These deeds accomplished, Jesus would then be free to depart by whatever manner suited him.

7. My impartial observer and I would then discuss what had just transpired while reviewing the video footage. If our recollections matched each other and were corroborated by the filmed record and if Jesus confirmed to me personally that he is the divine manifestation millions believe him to be, I would be forced to admit that my atheism was no longer justified and become (or, as it were, re-become) a Christian.

A religious reader — the laws of probability suggest I must have one or two — may find the above crass and bordering on offensive. “Why,” they might well ask, “should God go out of His way to prove Himself to a wiseass like you?” While it must require a truly cataclysmic circumstance to force a deity to “go out of his way,” I think it’s still a good question. I can’t think of a reason. If I had to have a god, I think I actually prefer one with better things to do than worry about whether someone somewhere doesn’t believe in him. But let me climb onto my anticlerical soapbox just long enough to say that this kind of exercise is never carried out the other way. That is, the devoutly religious, as far as I have ever observed, don’t bother pondering what it would take to break up, or at least shift, the bedrock of faith that has supported them their whole lives.

The reason, I suppose, is that nothing would. As we noted above, faith is largely impervious to facts and logic — otherwise it wouldn’t be faith so much as a passing fancy. We live in a world that has seen the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, the totalitarian regimes of Stalin and Pol Pot, and the recent, terrible natural disasters in Haiti and Myanmar. We all know perfectly kind and decent people who have suffered senseless tragedy, and others who never got a chance to enjoy the gifts that life offered them. So if you can wrap all that up into a belief that there is still a benevolent someone up there who loves you and is looking out for you, just what would it take for you to question that belief? And if you’re reluctant to confront the question, why?

Then one day you put on a pair of sunglasses and see things you never saw before, and your world goes to shit.

John Carpenter’s They Live looked unflinchingly at the underside of Ronald Reagan’s Morning in America. While Gordon Gekko was rhapsodizing about the goodness of greed, migrant worker George Nada trawled through a stunted shadow economy that grew like a fungus on America’s underbelly. They Live presents an America that seems decent enough to justify George’s faith: the squatters’ camp where he finds shelter runs on compassion and good old American hard work, a true expression of the generosity we hold as one of our core values. The problem, as it turns out, is the ultimate viper in the garden: the elite feeding on America’s underclass are actually aliens in human form, hopscotching rapaciously across the galaxy like a cross between Gordon Gekko and Galactus. Even more heartbreaking is when George discovers why he was able to maintain his faith in the American dream while it fell apart around him. The aliens have submerged the culture in subliminal messages, with every surface blaring a mute clarion of stasis and conformity. Thanks to a pair of sunglasses invented by the revolutionaries fighting the aliens, George walks through L.A. and finally sees, in literal black and white, the new guiding principles of America. SLEEP 8 HOURS A DAY. MARRY AND REPRODUCE. WATCH T.V. STAY ASLEEP. CONFORM. OBEY.

What makes They Live resonate so much for me, a decade after I first saw it and well after it was first released, is what it reveals about paranoia and the comforts of conspiracy. While the film bears the trappings of a sci-fi-based horror movie, its central conceit — that American society is being undermined by alien invaders — is actually more comforting than frightening, because it supports the premise that people are too fundamentally decent to create the kind of society depicted in They Live. Suddenly, we didn’t do it — it was done to us. This preserves our ideas of our own goodness while offering a tantalizing promise of redemption. An alien menace is a menace that can be fought and destroyed; what came from outside can be sent back outside. Sure, defeating a technologically advanced alien race is not going to be a walk in the park. But if there’s one thing we know how to do as humans, it’s kill those who are different from us. Whether the solution proved to be sunglasses, computer viruses or red anti-alien virus powder, we’d find a way. If, however, the problem turns out to be us — if we, not alien invaders, made the world around us, with all its greed and its waste and its callousness — then we’re probably screwed.

Being the object of a conspiracy, with untold numbers of nefarious actors working tirelessly to keep us in the dark and helpless, confirms our importance — it reassures us that we are dangerous and worth going to great efforts to deceive and subjugate. Furthermore, a world beset by conspiracy is a world that is at least governed by some kind of order and meaning, even if that order is largely bent against us and we are helpless to do anything about it. The world of They Live is a perversely tempting one, because then at least things would make sense — there would be a reason why everything was so fucked up and wrong.

As I get older, I find that in addition to constantly beginning statements by saying, “as I get older,” I increasingly subscribe to what I call the Belzer Dichotomy of Human Cognition. That is an affected way of saying that I agree with comedian Richard Belzer when he said:

You are either a conspiracy nut or a coincidence nut.

Conspiracies of course are Belzer’s schtick, and he’s carved out a secure niche for himself as the thinking paranoid’s comic of choice. To a conspiracy buff, “coincidence” is a slightly dirty word, a mark of intellectual pansyhood, a confession that one lacks the imagination or the courage to see life as it really is. But I think Belzer was actually on to something quite universal and profound when he said that. We could rephrase the line like this:

You either believe that everything, no matter how trivial, happens for a reason, or you believe that even seemingly important things can happen for no reason at all.

This is about as basic a distinction between human consciousnesses as you can make, and it doesn’t take a great deal of observation to perceive that conspiracy nuts vastly outnumber coincidence nuts. We are biologically hardwired to notice patterns and to ascribe significance to them. In a nutshell, it is why religion exists. Religions vary greatly over times and places, but the one thing they virtually all have in common is the reassurance that the world around you was created, and is advancing, with some kind of purpose. That sense of purpose is why people profess to believe things that are, by any waking, rational standard, absurd. What follows is not an original observation by any means, but even so: if you could have somehow reached adulthood without any religious indoctrination or awareness, and then been approached by a Christian or a Hindu or a Muslim aiming to make a convert out of you, would you take his or her claims at all seriously? Would it seem reasonable to believe that Jesus was born of a virgin and rose from the dead, or that illiterate Mohammed was given the power to read by an angel, whatever that is?

I think the honest answer has to be no, but I understand now that the question is beside the point. I think a great many people who consider themselves religious either don’t actually believe the tenets of their doctrine or else are so indifferent to them that it makes no difference. It is the consolation and comfort that are important; the precepts and dogma are just tools, arbitrary elements to give the conscious, waking part of the brain something to do, like playing solitaire on a computer.

There was a story recently published on Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish (I couldn’t find it again to link it) about a devout Christian who lost his child in an accident. He was overwhelmed with grief, as anyone would be. Where he perhaps took it a step further was when he asserted that the accident was God’s punishment for his sins — that the “accident” was, in effect, his fault. His family and friends tried to insist that he was wrong, that God did not work that way and that sometimes bad things just happened to those who apparently did not deserve them. He would not be persuaded, and eventually explained that he preferred to believe God had murdered his child to expiate his own sins (I’m paraphrasing slightly), because to contemplate the alternative — that his child had died, and his world been destroyed, for no reason at all — was actually more horrifying.

The point of all this is to illustrate that people will go to tremendous intellectual lengths to see the world as being guided by some kind of purpose, and that if they have to choose between an evil purpose and no purpose, they will mostly choose the former. You can see this all too clearly today. There has always been a paranoid strain in American politics, and I’m not going to claim that it’s worse today than it has ever been in the past. But the advent of the Internet and the coarsening of network news (which exists almost entirely to frighten people into watching) has expanded the scope of our fears to a degree that seems without precedent. We believe that the president is a foreign-born socialist mole aimed at instituting either a secular Communist paradise or sharia law, we can’t quite decide which; we believe that the Bush administration knew of the September 11 attacks and allowed them to occur. We believe scientists are making up global warming and hiding the evidence that vaccines cause autism. We believe in a “gay agenda” to convert straight people into homosexuals, as if the gay community were organized like the Mormon church. We believe that the media is hiding the truth about both Obama’s birth certificate and high-fructose corn syrup. Whatever we believe, there’s always a “them” to blame it on. If only we could take care of them, fix them or teach them or avoid them or just plain get rid of them, things would go back to the way they’re supposed to be. How appropriate that Carpenter named his film with that anonymous, ominous pronoun. They do live, and They are everywhere.

"It figures it would be something like this."

Me, I admit it: I’m a coincidence nut. Sometimes — most of the time — shit just happens. I’m not saying that there aren’t instances where evil or self-serving people collude in secret for their own ends. And I’m certainly not saying the government and the media are to be trusted. I’m just saying that the global, sweeping, everyone-else-is-in-on-it kind of conspiracy is a figment of our collective imagination — an understandable but irrational belief stemming from our need to occupy a purposeful universe. There simply aren’t enough people in the world smart enough, wicked enough or determined enough to fake global warming or hide Barack Obama’s true identity or whatever. Someone always screws up, and someone always talks. It’s human nature. There are very few conspiracy theories that can’t be explained by a mix of incompetence, happenstance and ordinary self-interest.

We are small beings on a big world in an incomprehensibly vast universe. Even the best and brightest of us are terribly limited in our perceptions. Our brains take cognitive shortcuts that make us feel smarter than we are, and because we spend our entire lives stuck in our own heads, immersed in our subjectivity alone, we naturally interpret everything around us in terms of how it affects us personally. It takes a certain leap of imagination to jump out of this view, and it takes something perhaps more difficult: a willingness to see yourself as one tiny, tiny part of an immense whole, a whole that is largely indifferent to what you do or even to whether you’re there at all. There is no plan. There are just atoms in their peculiar orbits, joining and separating, colliding or drifting for a time into emptiness.

I get why people find this scary. True freedom always is. It scares me sometimes. I have no one to blame if I am unhappy or end up frittering my life away. And if I live in a world in which people seem to be greedy, short-sighted or just out for themselves, I have only to think of the too-frequent times when I have been one or more of those things, and to reflect on the multitudes of people in the world who have those qualities to an even greater degree than I do. It doesn’t take special sunglasses to see why a world made by people as flawed as us would turn out to be so flawed.

I have a soft spot for Scott (whom I occasionally call by his first name). Raymond Chandler felt that Fitzgerald just missed being a great writer, and I can see his point: an awful lot of Fitzgerald’s work is either not quite formed (his first two novels, which honestly I have been so far unable to finish) or commercial and vaguely hacky (much of his short fiction, although many of his stories are beautiful and completely honest). Someone once said Fitzgerald is a writer best discovered when young, and as a no-longer-quite-young person, I think that’s true. He has a young person’s longing to be swept up and away, a young person’s ideals, a young person’s eagerness to admire — even to worship — and to mold himself in a beautiful and noble image.

Yet while I am no longer able to look at life quite as breathlessly as his characters do, I sympathize with, and even admire, their determination to live in a kind of refined and rarefied grace. I am nearly Fitzgerald’s age when he died, and I marvel at how strong his idealist streak remained through years that tried him severely. I can’t remember where I read it, but I recall he once described Tender Is the Night as a “testament of faith.” Partly it was simply faith in himself, in his ability to persevere while living with a mad wife, deepening debts and dwindling inspiration. And partly it was faith that the beautiful illusion was still worth cherishing, worth nurturing, worth bringing, however improbably, toward reality. Beauty is truth, as Keats said and Fitzgerald believed, and it’s no coincidence that a Keats verse inspired the novel’s title.

The beauty of Tender lies in its characterizations, both those of the human characters and the settings they inhabit. Fitzgerald shows us a French Riviera that is sun-baked, aloof and rather incomplete without the cosmopolitan visitors who give it life. He draws us into the action, as he did in The Great Gatsby, through an observer, the young film star Rosemary Hoyt. Like many Fitzgerald heroines, she inspires and expects admiration, but her vanity is excused by her youth, and we admire her seriousness, her sense of duty, and her devotion to her mother, even if it sometimes borders on idolatry. Through her we meet an array of colorful, briskly drawn characters: dissolute Abe North, the crass, volatile McKiscos, and Tommy Barban, a hotheaded brawler with a surprising gift for biding his time. At the heart of the novel lies the golden couple Dick and Nicole Diver, who appear to the naive Rosemary to have everything: looks, money, poise, discernment, and a knack for making everything around them seem charged with exclusivity and promise. The talented psychiatrist Dick, in particular, has a preternatural gift for social life. To be included in his company is to feel an elevated sense of privilege, to perceive oneself as an irreplaceable component of a fragile, evanescent moment in time. Dick Diver seems to have successfully elevated living itself to the realm of art, and it makes him irresistible.

The Divers, as every American lit student knows, are based on Gerald and Sara Murphy, a pair of expatriate socialites who counted among their circle of friends pretty much everyone you would have wanted to know if you were at all interested in the post-war arts scene: Hemingway, Picasso, Cole Porter, Jean Cocteau, Dorothy Parker, and, to their eventual consternation, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Like the Divers, the Murphys were wealthy but not gauche, trendsetters rather than followers, and had a gift for la dolce vita (or whatever that would be in French) that made them seem even more brilliant than they undoubtedly were. Virtually everyone who came into the Murphys’ orbit rhapsodized about them, as the rootless expats in Tender rhapsodize about the Divers. But Fitzgerald had bigger things in mind than a fictionalized biography of two of his friends, and that ambition elevates the novel to near-greatness — and provides its fatal flaw.

The problem is that Dick and Nicole aren’t just based on Gerald and Sara Murphy; they’re based just as much on Scott and Zelda, and for all his ecstatic prose and pulpy plot twists (including a duel with pistols and a corpse found in Rosemary’s bedroom), Scott can’t fully hide the seams. As Rosemary moves deeper into the Divers’ world, she falls in love with Dick and also discovers the couple’s dark secret: Nicole is schizoid, and Dick fell in love with her when she was his patient. Their marriage uneasily combines romance and therapy, devotion and obligation, and as Dick comes to reciprocate Rosemary’s affections and Nicole grows increasingly restive in her role as patient and wife, it unravels and eventually falls apart.

Like Scott Fitzgerald, Dick Diver started his career with a meteoric publishing success but has latterly found himself treading water, fiddling with a vast follow-up volume he can’t make any progress on. (The theme of squandered potential recurs again and again in Tender, from Abe North, a once-promising composer who hasn’t written in years, to young Rosemary Hoyt, who cannot find a success to match that of her first breakout role, in a film called, with suitable Freudian resonance, Daddy’s Girl. The title is doubly gruesome, referring not only to Rosemary’s child-like worship of Dick but to Nicole’s sexual abuse at the hands of her father which drove her to madness.) Like Scott, Dick’s mentally ill wife drains him of his creativity and ambitions. And like Scott, Dick drowns his frustration in drink, and drink makes him an asshole and eventually a pariah. In real life, the temperate Murphys cast the sodden Fitzgerald out of their circle after Scott lobbed a garbage can over their garden wall; in the novel, Dick has to carry both the worst of Scott Fitzgerald and the best of Gerald Murphy in his own person, and the combination never fully convinces. For all of Tender’s focus on psychology, Fitzgerald was not a psychological writer in the way someone like Henry James was. What inspired him was personality: that “unbroken series of successful gestures” (as Nick Carraway calls it in The Great Gatsby) by which a person makes himself, like a self-creating deity from mythology, into an object of fascination, grace and beauty. This dynamic, simultaneously noble and absurd, helps to make Gatsby (and its title character) so sympathetic and enduring. Gatsby may be an empty suit, but his emptiness has an integrity: it is all of a piece, the honest core of a man who has chosen to be a surface and to treat the rest of the world as if it were just as artificial, and ripe for reinvention, as himself.

The reason why Dick Diver fails to come convincingly to life is that his creator didn’t fully understand the man who inspired him. An admirer of successful surfaces, Fitzgerald could not see beneath the gestures of Gerald Murphy’s life to the traits that motivated them. The result is a character who, for the love of a starlet half his age, throws away everyone and everything he cares about. One feels neither sympathy for a weak man unable to resist his appetites, nor justified indignation at the callow machinations of a cad. Dick’s fall is not tragic but phlegmatic — he does not have Gatsby’s absurd, touching faith in the rightness of his own destiny. Dick’s desire for a younger woman, and for a renewal of the sense of purpose he felt as a young man, are banal, and Fitzgerald doesn’t do banal — banality is the very thing his characters long to escape.

Fitzgerald imagines the Divers’ marriage as something like a donkey elevator, in which one car could not rise without the other, opposing car falling. As Dick starts to lose himself in his love for Rosemary, Nicole grows more capable and confident. By the novel’s end, Nicole is embarking on a new life with Tommy Barban, her troubles seemingly behind her, while Dick, friendless and on the downward slope of his career, fades into obscurity. As psychology, this is absurd: marriages don’t function on Newtonian principles, certainly not one in which one partner is schizophrenic and the other a hopeless alcoholic. Fitzgerald’s marriage to Zelda took its toll on him, but Zelda did no better in the bargain. Nicole and Dick’s doomed marriage feels like something between redemptive fantasy and painful settling of accounts: Scott lays the blame for his stalled career firmly on Zelda while imagining that his sacrifice was at least worthwhile — that Zelda might have taken his strength and been healed by it. But Scott doesn’t seem to know why this would have happened, and Nicole’s redemption (from a disturbed socialite to a woman redeemed by the love of Tommy Barban) is even more opaque and baffling than Dick’s disgrace.

What I found most rewarding in Tender Is the Night was the myriad ways in which Scott explored, analyzed and obsessed over his own dissolution. Dick Diver is just the most obvious of the novel’s Fitzgerald stand-ins. Abe North carries out the same kind of drunken antics for which Fitzgerald himself became notorious; I am convinced that a prank referred to in the early sections, in which Abe was thrown out of a restaurant for attempting to saw a waiter in half (“Wouldn’t you like to know what was inside a waiter?”), came directly from Fitzgerald’s own life. Dick Diver eventually washes his hands of North, exactly as Gerald Murphy finally had had enough of Scott. Albert McKisco doesn’t find success as a writer until he takes to dumbing down others’ ideas for mass consumption, becoming the hack crowd-pleaser Fitzgerald felt he had become. (“They pay the old whore $4,000 a screw now,” he wrote to Hemingway, referring to the then-astronomical fees his short stories earned.) As a chronicler of the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald never shied away from showing what happened after the party ended, and the characters in Tender Is the Night seem trapped in an endless, Dantean hangover. Everyone’s best days are behind them (even, it seems, young Rosemary Hoyt’s), and no one save for Nicole and Tommy seem to have any idea what to make of the days that remain. Perhaps only a writer as enthralled with youth as Fitzgerald could feel the disappointments of middle age so acutely. Gatsby never lived to see his beautiful surface pit and scar with age, while Nicole Diver must ruefully watch the mirror for signs of sagging and stiffening flesh, and Dick ponders a professional legacy that seems to diminish before his eyes. Not a beautiful vision of life — but a true one.

Perhaps Jobs soft-pedaled this announcement because he knew it wasn’t a surprise at all. The night before the iPad launch, McGraw-Hill CEO Terry McGraw spilled many of Steve Jobs’ beans in an interview with CNBC, breezily confirming that Apple was announcing a tablet computer running the iPhone OS, for which McGraw-Hill was collaborating with Apple to provide educational content. It might not appear entirely out of character for Jobs to lop McGraw-Hill out of his presentation, provided it had ever been included — Jobs famously dropped graphics chip vendor ATI from a keynote when they revealed upcoming Mac models before he could. And it prompts a mordant chuckle to imagine the look on Jobs’ face as he watched McGraw blithely steal his thunder. But I give Jobs the benefit of the doubt. It is likely that Apple’s negotiations with textbook publishers are still in progress, and that Apple will formally tout the iPad as an education tool at a later date. Because this arrangement is a very big deal — one that could potentially have a huge impact on both parties.

A little background. When pundits bewail (or laud) the impending “death of print,” the implied subject is usually newspapers and magazines, whose advertising-based revenues have proved impossible to replicate in the online space. To these publishers, the iPad and the devices that will succeed it offer a renewed hope that digital content can actually be monetized through subscriptions to iPad-native versions of their publications. College textbook publishers, though, are in a very similar predicament. Their revenues have been falling, but for a different reason. While newspapers struggle to compete against the resolutely free (as in beer) ethos of the World Wide Web, textbook publishers compete against a much more insidious foe: their own products.

If you went to college within the last few decades, you probably bought many of your textbooks used. Maybe you found it convenient to own a book where the key passages were already underlined and highlighted, but it’s more likely you simply wanted to save some money: generally about 40% of the cost of a new copy of the same book, if my addled memory serves me. No one can blame a student for wanting to save money, but buying used textbooks turns out to be a classic instance of a decision that benefits the individual at the expense of the collective — and ultimately, the individual herself.

Used books are bought and sold by used book dealers, not the original publisher of the textbook. When a textbook is released in a new edition, the publisher collects revenue for every copy sold of that edition. Then the academic term ends, and the used book dealer appears behind those long folding tables in the campus bookstore, buying back every usable copy of that new edition. Say for the sake of argument that the used book seller buys back 50% of the publishing run. (Note that I have no idea what the actual average is, or if there even is a reliable average.) The next semester, for every new copy the bookstore orders of that title, there is a cheaper used copy sitting next to it on the shelf. Students buy the used books until they run out, then buy the new ones. The publisher’s revenue from the book is half of what it was in the previous term, and the edition is not even a year old. Then that semester ends, the used book people come back, and the cycle repeats.

Run this equation a few times and you see the dilemma the publisher is in: its new product is quickly elbowed out of the market by identical but cheaper product from which it collects no revenue. (Just to be clear about this, because a lot of people don’t understand or believe it: used book companies have no relation to book publishers and pay them no royalties on any of the books they buy and sell.) That’s how it was when I was in school. Today, with the power of the internet, the publisher’s situation is much worse. Students can now visit eBay or Half.com if the campus bookstore is out of used editions. Some enterprising students have even ordered international copies of the same edition — priced considerably lower to compete in less affluent markets — and gone into business selling textbooks to their fellow students at a fraction of the domestic price.

(We’ll get back to the iPad in a minute, I promise.)

Publishers have tried to combat this trend in two ways. The first is to revise textbooks more often, in order to render the used editions obsolete. But few academic subjects warrant such frequent revisions, and students and faculty alike balk at this strategy: students for the obvious financial reasons, and teachers because a new edition forces them to rewrite their tests and lectures. The other approach has been to load new textbooks with goodies that used books don’t have: PowerPoint notes, study guides, practice tests, even multimedia and interactive software. The trouble with this is that not every product appeals to every student, meaning a whole kitchen sink of add-ons has to be thrown in to appeal to as many students as possible, thus raising the cost of the book (further, as publishers have already had to raise prices to make up for the revenue they’ve lost) and forcing even more students into the arms of the used book seller.

How to get out of this impasse?

Textbook publishers need a form of digital textbook that can be registered to a single owner and that expires a set time after being activated. This not only solves the problem of used books, it saves them the massive cost of printing, warehousing and shipping textbooks. It allows them to recruit talented authors with the promise of greater royalties — and perhaps most importantly, offers the real prospect of reduced textbook prices, as efficiencies can be passed on as savings to the student. Everybody wins.

The problem holding back this happy state of affairs is the same one facing newspapers and magazines: reading a digital text on a laptop is simply not as convenient, effective or rewarding as reading and holding a physical textbook. As a piece of technology, the book is actually quite difficult to improve on: it’s compact (reasonably), requires no power to use and can last forever if treated with care. You can write in it, shove notes in it and use it to fight off a CIA assassin. Students need a digital textbook that benefits them, not just the publishers, and no one has yet succeeded in making one.

Enter the iPad. From the demo given of an interactive iPad edition of the New York Times, it is easy to see the device’s potential for digital textbooks. All the multimedia, online access and bookmarking features a student could ask for, along with the portability of a slate of plastic and glass that weighs a pound and a half. One could argue that few people actually need to carry their entire reading libraries around with them all the time, but the few who do are college students. In addition, students could carry their notes and their term papers in progress, as well as have constant access to their professor’s online course management site, all from the same slim device.

The Kindle cannot do this. For one thing, its screen, however good it may be for reading, is not equipped to reproduce the pedagogy of a modern textbook, which increasingly has come to resemble the USA Today weather map (imagine that on an iPad) in its colors and 3-D effects. For another, the Kindle is too specialized. You can bookmark your texts, annotate them and look up words, but you can’t instant message your classmate, navigate a complex website or type notes during a lecture. Textbooks are only the beginning of the classroom experience, and Kindle is unequipped to recognize that reality. (I will also say that, in the little time I’ve handled it, I have found the Kindle quite underwhelming: slow, lacking in customizability and embodying a distinctly last-century aesthetic. One further benefit to adopting the iPad on campus: students will want to own them.)

The benefits for textbook publishers then become obvious: here is a device that might finally usher in the digital textbook as a viable product. The benefits for Apple are less crucial, but still not to be taken lightly. For one thing, it will deal a crippling nut-shot to Amazon’s foray into the hardware business and position Apple as the top-selling e-book manufacturer — within, I would guess, a very short time, say 12 months after release. (Amazon still refuses to say how many Kindles they’ve sold. Bet that Apple will not be so reticent.) For another, universities represent a very nice market for hardware sales — especially hardware that’s mandated by the school’s curriculum. Whether students end up bringing the devices to campus themselves or leasing them from the university, Apple could end up putting a lot of iPads into a lot of hands. And beyond that is the prestige: Apple is proud of its heritage as a favorite of educators, and building the first great digital learning device of the 21st century is not something Steve Jobs takes lightly. (Note his strained and slightly bizarre affirmation that Apple’s goal is to combine technology and liberal arts, the latter a term you rarely hear outside of a college curriculum.)

So while Jobs’ launch of the iPad was comprehensive, it ignored one of the device’s biggest potential uses. I expect this will be corrected. At some point this year — I have no inside information, and am simply surmising — Apple will formally launch the iPad as a digital textbook reader, announcing its partnerships with loudmouth Terry McGraw and other educational publishers, demoing all the incredible things that an iPad textbook will be able to do, and most likely touting an agreement with one or more major universities to conduct pilot studies of iPads on campus. One lucky class at Stanford or Berkley or somewhere will be issued a new iPad along with their student ID. And what may turn out to be the iPad’s most significant role will truly begin. Small wonder Terry McGraw couldn’t wait to talk about it.

It would be inaccurate, I think, to say that Harris stood in favor of torture as such. However, he did argue powerfully that our revulsion to torture is essentially hypocritical, extending as it does from a sort of moral blind spot. Harris’ argument is too lengthy to quote directly, so I will summarize it as fairly as I can.

1. We are resigned to what we call in warfare “collateral damage,” meaning the unintended destruction of non-military targets and the injury and death of civilians.
2. The toll in pain and death exacted by collateral damage is as gruesome as that of any other wartime horror: men, women and children are blinded, crippled, mutilated or killed, or suffer thirst, starvation and sickness in the wake of attacks that destroy local infrastructure and services.
3. The pain and suffering of the collaterally damaged is, in fact, qualitatively of little to no difference to that suffered under torture.
4. The preceding premises being true, one cannot morally object to one but not the other; anyone willing to accept collateral damage in wartime has no basis from which to declaim torture as immoral.

Harris made this argument to illustrate the limitations and biases inherent in our moral reasoning, particularly the human tendency to respond to individual suffering while remaining relatively unmoved by the suffering of a great many people. There is a component of torture — perhaps the way in which it is reducible in our imaginations to a dichotomy of victim and tormentor, the latter holding the former utterly in his power — that seems immediate and visceral. Yet Harris, while admitting even he found his own conclusions unsettling, was not simply arguing as the devil’s advocate. Those who have read The End of Faith will know that Harris has a very large axe to grind against Islamic fundamentalism; unlike most thinkers of essentially leftist bent, Harris has no compunction about denouncing Islam as a religion of ignorance, hatred and cruelty, nor does he balk at describing its war on the West in essentially neoconservative terms: that is, as a clash of civilizations, a zero-sum game in which compromise or rapprochement is out of the question.

As a person repulsed by the torture that has been carried out by my government ostensibly on my behalf, I was brought up short by Harris’ arguments. Had I been too quick to give in to my instinctive reaction of horror and outrage? How can one argue with any conviction that slamming a man’s head repeatedly into a wall is worse than, say, burning a little girl with napalm while denuding the forests surrounding her village? Is one of these things really worse than the other?

Upon reflection, I came to the conclusion that yes, one of these really is worse than the other. The reason lies in an argument that Harris used earlier in his book but forgot, or omitted, to apply to the torture debate. That reason is intention.

The End of Faith spends considerable time discussing of Noam Chomsky, who has argued that the United States routinely commits atrocities of the magnitude of September 11 and that we are, at best, no worse than the terrorists who struck back at us; in fact, our arrogance and self-righteousness actually make us worse. Harris has no time for this facile moral equivalency. Citing Chomsky’s example of the U.S. bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical laboratory in 1998 (which Chomsky claims doomed hundreds of thousands to die of otherwise treatable illnesses), Harris points out an obvious, and significant, distinction. The U.S. attack came as part of an effort to destroy sources of biological and chemical weapons. It was not the United States’ intention — nor was it even in its strategic interest — to destroy a vital source of medicine for the civilian population. The September 11 hijackers chose precisely the opposite tactic, one designed to cause the maximum possible civilian destruction, and concomitantly, the maximum amount of horror, grief and revulsion.

It may be — and is — cold comfort for thousands of bereaved Sudanese to be told, essentially, “We didn’t mean it when we consigned your children to die of malaria and dysentery.” But as Harris points out, intention forms the very foundation of ethics. And ethics, I might add, forms the very foundation of justice. The modern justice system is based on the understanding that motivation is the key to understanding crime and properly administering punishment or redress. Two people might be brutally run over by cars on the same night; one may be the victim of an enraged ex-husband, the other of a sudden and fatal impulse to run into the street after a dropped $20 bill. Although the result in these two situations is the same, as is the sense of loss experienced by the bereaved families, they are not the same crime, and there is no ethical argument for treating them as such.

This is the difference between a girl blinded in a bombing and a man driven irreparably mad by physical and psychological torture. We go out of our way to ensure that the bomb will not injure the girl, continually improving the accuracy and precision of our weapons to ensure only strategically significant targets are destroyed. The purpose of any attack in war is to limit or destroy the enemy’s capacity to fight back, not to murder and terrorize civilians; indeed, the latter effect might well work against the former. Exceptions can, of course, be cited throughout the history of our country and our world, from repugnant aberrations such as My Lai to deliberate wholesale destruction, such as Sherman’s March. But as a general principle of warfare, the axiom is sound: attacking military targets and avoiding civilian ones is the most effective way to wage war.

This is sound military strategy, but it is also a sound moral position, one held by generals as much as by civilians on the home front. We maintain a distinction between civilian and military targets because it is a crucial way of maintaining our humanity in the midst of the harrowing pressures of war. War may be hell, but it is a hell we have tempered through mutually agreed-upon rules for civilized conflict: capturing instead of slaughtering troops who surrender; refraining from the use of chemical or biological weapons; honoring neutrality; and affording all those within a war zone a measure of basic human dignity. Civilized nations do not sell prisoners into slavery, prostitute them or hold them for ransom. And civilized nations do not torture.

Torture deprives human beings of their humanity in a way that mere imprisonment, even in harsh conditions, does not. It is not the randomness of flying shrapnel or the error of shelling the hospital instead of the munitions factory. It is an act of calculated cruelty, a deliberate stripping away of the mental and psychological resources that are the bequest of civilization itself. There is a very good reason why torture strikes such a deep chord of horror and unease within us, why most of the Americans who insist on the benefits of this practice still can’t bring themselves to drop the mealy-mouthed euphemism “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Only a sociopath — or one who has completely excluded the enemy from their moral universe through racism, nativism or simple abject fear — can remain unmoved by the spectacle of one human being reducing another to a state of infantile helplessness through the application of pain. It is simply not who we are.

This is not, as Harris maintains, the result of some facile moral blindness. The capacity to treat even our enemies with a modicum of respect is the quality that, to be blunt, makes us better than them; it is a component of our cultural identity far more valuable than any transient strategic advantage that torture might confer. (That there is little evidence that torture confers any such advantage is beside the point.) We as Americans may not be — may never have been — as exceptional as we claimed. But we entered this conflict with a clear moral advantage, one which I, at least, clung to over the last turbulent eight years. I believed that the ideals which my country maintained even in war were worthy ideals, and that we could never truly be defeated as long as we held fast to them.

Now my country is afraid — so afraid that it couldn’t shed those ideals fast enough, as long as their loss granted a feeling of safety and control; exercising our power and our cruelty gave us the heady rush of charging into battle full-bore, all guns ablaze, redeeming ourselves for the torpor that allowed the attacks to succeed in the first place. Too few people stopped to ask if this crack-cocaine rush of bogus courage was worth the price; and while many people still insist ours is the greatest nation on earth, they are at greater and greater pains to explain why.

I’ve been following this story — what very little there has been of it to follow — for about three years now, ever since the Apple Computer/Apple Corps trial, when the secretive Neil Aspinall was forced to admit in court proceedings that he was, in fact, supervising a total revamping of the group’s catalog. Questions that had been fruitlessly batted back and forth are now finally answered. Yes, the mono Sgt. Pepper will come out; in fact, all of the albums will be available in mono (except for Abbey Road, which was never released that way). Yes, the music has been cleaned up in a way that, we are assured, adds the punch expected of contemporary rock while still being true to the original mixes’ ambience. Yes, even the original, oddball stereo mixes of Help! and Rubber Soul will come out, which most people will likely not bother to listen to more than once. And while no details of packaging have been released, we know we can get all these goodies in two fell swoops: all of the stereo albums and all the mono albums will be available in two separate box sets.

It was that last detail that really brought it home to me, that illuminated what should have been a patently obvious fact: they are going to sell a shitload of discs.

I think the reason I never bothered to think of it is that parallel to the tantalizing prospect of remastered Beatles tracks has run the story of another, long-delayed, Beatles milestone, the availability of the tracks for online purchase and download. Every imminent Macworld Expo or iPod announcement brought a fresh crop of rumors that this, finally, would be the one where Jobs could make the announcement that, so we all believe, he has been so eager to make: that the world’s greatest band was coming to the world’s biggest music retailer.

Except, honestly, I never gave much of a shit whether or when the Beatles went digital. Five years ago, before iTunes had cemented its grip on the digital music market, the Fabs’ presence might have made a difference; had one of the upstart services like MTV managed to lure them with a sweetheart deal, it would have given iTunes a serious black eye and, possibly, some worthy competition. As it is, despite some grumbling in the Beatles’ camp about not seeing eye-to-eye with Apple on prices, there is no viable third-party alternative for the Beatles in going online. Amazon, despite running a very nice digital download service, barely has double-digit market share, and going with an also-ran service would cheapen the Beatles’ image enough to not be worth whatever concessions the band could get. If the Beatles don’t go with iTunes, they’ll open their own storefront; right now I’d say it’s even money either way.

But whether the Beatles sell their music through iTunes or from their own servers doesn’t really matter, anymore than whether you buy your CDs at Borders or Best Buy. What really counts — all that really counts — is the music. People are going to want it. Just as the Anthology albums did ten years ago, it will give people an excuse to fall in love with the Beatles again — and it’s going to be a pretty damn good excuse. The albums will be impeccably packaged, with liner notes, photos (the inserts on the current CDs are comically paltry) and even QuickTime documentaries on the making of each album. They are also, from everything I’ve heard so far, going to sound great. Everyone is going to want these.

The L.A. Times quoted a Beatles expert named Martin Lewis:

“There will be cynics who will point quite accurately to the vanishing CD marketplace,” Lewis said. “There’s no doubt it will not do as spectacularly well as had they reissued them in 2001 in the wake of the ’1′ [hits compilation] album, which has sold 31 million copies worldwide and 8 million in the U.S. But any cynics who say the Beatles have missed the boat will be wrong. This will sell exceedingly well and will be a huge boost to the recorded music industry.

“And if the CD is going to die,” he said, “the Beatles are going to give it a superb wake.”

I think Lewis is wrong and right. I don’t think releasing the albums in the wake of 1 would have helped them sell better. Part of the reason 1 was such a hit was that it was the first high-profile Beatles release people had had a chance to buy in a long time. Releasing the albums after that would likely have led many to think that, actually, 1 was enough for the time being.

But in his second point, Lewis is dead on. EMI and Capitol are going to have a very nice Christmas this year thanks to the Beatles. And I think his point about the death of the CD is a good one — perhaps better than he is aware.

The reissue of the Beatles catalog is, in a way, the ultimate shoe-drop, the event that the music buying public has been unconsciously awaiting since shortly after the CDs first came out (and earned criticism for their mono mixes and overall un-dynamic sound). The first Beatles CDs were issued 23 years ago, and except for some low-key reissues here and there (the White Album anniversary release, Let It Be … Naked), the CDs on store shelves today are the exact same ones that were on the shelves at Sam Goodies or Tower or Virgin back in the late 80s.

I remember how, once the Beatles were out, CDs seemed to have arrived, beginning in earnest their irrevocable shift from yuppie status symbol to a true format for the masses. (I’m old enough to remember when people used to be ridiculed for buying and listening to CDs. Well, at least for buying and listening to Brothers in Arms.) Now we’re witnessing the tail end of that cycle. People are growing more accustomed to the realization that music is information; audiophiles still have the option to buy their black shiny discs, but the fetishization of the music delivery vehicle, whether the vinyl LP, the cassette tape or the CD, is ending. When every CD you buy goes straight onto your iPod anyway, it’s only natural to wonder why you’re bothering with the shiny disc in the first place.

But the Beatles, I predict, will be a special case. The remastered Beatles CDs will be the last music that people will actually want to own on CD. (A friend of mine, in fact, told me they were “probably the last CDs I will ever buy.”) They may not realize it consciously, but buying the Beatles on CD one last time will serve as a tacit farewell to an entire era, when we helped change the economics of the music industry by happily buying our favorite music again and again, each time with a promise of improved fidelity, of more sumptuous packaging — of somehow being closer to the music we cared about. Cynics have always derided this, seeing the industry’s treadmill of reissues as nothing more than a ruse for parting nostalgic music lovers from more of their money. But there was always more to it than that, wasn’t there? Re-buying an album in a better edition was a small act of devotion, a conscious renewing of ties with a work of art that gave your life a little extra meaning. Loading up your player with the stereo mix of Pet Sounds or the 5.1 version of Dark Side of the Moon was both thrilling and familiar, a batch of impending surprises you knew you were going to love. All that for, what, 12 bucks? A bargain.

So it will be with the Beatles. People will once again savor the experience of viewing the new packaging and photos, reading the new liner notes, hearing the opening notes of “I Saw Her Standing There” or “Help!” or “Back in the U.S.S.R.” as though for the first time. What ensuing CD purchase, what classic album reissue, can live up to that? Once the definitive Beatles CDs are safely on the shelf, why bother with music on shiny discs again?

And also, truth be told, because I have an unfailing sympathy for the uncool. And McCartney, no matter how cool his various achievements, will always, personally, be uncool. As many a sardonic wag has remarked, The Beatles are dying in order of coolness. Ringo’s next.

Reading my essay over now, there are a few things I would change: I’d tone down the Yoko bashing, for one thing. (The creepy, unhealthy psychodrama of the Lennon/Ono marriage rests more with the groom than the bride.) For another, I actually think I could’ve made my case stronger. Forget for a moment the fact that, in 1966, McCartney was among the handsomest, most interesting and most sought-after (read: cool) figure in arguably the most culturally significant city in the world at that moment. He went where he wanted, slept with whom he wanted, did whatever the fuck he pleased; no one would turn down a chance to trade places with Paul McCartney. But forget all that and just stick to what you can quantify. McCartney was the first of the Beatles to write his own songs, the first member of the fledgling Quarrymen who actually knew how to play. (Lennon played the guitar with banjo chords until “Paul taught [him] to play properly.”) Unlike Lennon, who before meeting Ono deeply mistrusted anything avante garde, McCartney eagerly absorbed the musique concrete of Stockhausen or Glass, and was the first of the Beatles to rip the eraserhead out of his tape recorder and begin making tape loops in his home studio. Without McCartney, “Tomorrow Never Knows” would have consisted of John Lennon banging out C on his acoustic guitar, and the world might have been spared “Revolution #9″ altogether. It was McCartney who pushed the Abbey Road engineers to overdrive the trebly guitars of “Nowhere Man” and who had the idea of recording his bass through another amplifier instead of a conventional microphone. Critical opinion has swung between either Sgt. Pepper or Revolver as the Beatles’ masterpiece — and both are dominated by Paul, from behind the desk if not always behind the mike. This is something beyond cool; there are maybe a dozen people in 20th century popular music who can claim achievements of this rank.

And yet.

I will defend McCartney’s creativity and experimentalism to the end. Yet my heart-of-hearts favorite Beatle?

John.

John Lennon was a deeply wounded man, a man for whom braggadoccio and cruelty served as a mask for an insecure boy who never stopped resenting all the grownups who thought he was worthless — and who he must have at least occasionally suspected were right. Lennon’s earliest efforts at “honest” songwriting were exercises in formulaic self-pity, no more or less fundamentally honest than the likes of “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” But somewhere around 1965, Lennon figured out how to tap his inner conflicts without resorting to sad-clown poses. He presented the tangle of his psyche with all its contradictions intact, grounding his songs in uncertainty, hesitancy, confusion. Lennon’s finest songs — “She Said She Said,” “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “I Am the Walrus” — are snapshots of a tumbling psyche in mid-churn.

The usual critical line is that McCartney, by contrast, was shallow, preferring to pander with a smiling face and a thumb perenially turned upward. That’s an oversimplification. McCartney aired his share of emotional dirty laundry, most famously in “We Can Work It Out,” positively Lennonian even before his partner added its rather impatient middle eight. But McCartney, ever the forward-thinking optimist, tended to present his emotional dilemmas post-facto, their tensions already resolved. If Lennon’s songs were the work of a skeptic, McCartney’s were the product of a believer. Think of “Let It Be” and its famous opening lines:

When I find myself in times of trouble
Mother Mary comes to me

No sooner is the crisis introduced than the solution arrives. Lennon could have handily written an entire song about finding himself in times of trouble — indeed I seem to recall a song called “Help” written in 1965 or so — but for McCartney, it is merely the precursor for the dramatic uplift, the consolation that is the song’s true message. “Hey Jude” of course is an anthem of consolation, a plea for optimism that is both cannily calculated and wholly heartfelt. Both “Hey Jude” and “Let It Be” are gorgeous songs, and the former is among the Beatles’ very finest, but unlike Lennon’s finest, they begin after the crisis has taken place, not in the middle of it.

So I will always admire Paul’s amazing abilities, his drive, and his belief that the ordinary and the positive are worth celebrating. But it’s John who, briefly and wonderfully, speaks to me.

Somehow it tells you so much about Paul McCartney: the need to present a sunny, all’s-well face to the world; the juvenile streak that manifests so often in his music (even John knew to stay away from dangerous machinery when he was stoned); and most importantly, the essential mystery that has been hiding in the public’s plain sight ever since the Beatles first came to the consciousness of a generation. McCartney was the smiling, puppy-eyed charmer, and he adopted that characterization so expertly that few people to this day have bothered to look past it. They see a shallow media persona and assume it hides a shallow man, and they’re wrong.

It was not always so. Anyone involved in London’s artistic and cultural ferment of the mid-sixties (which John Lennon largely wasn’t, preferring to shuttle his friends out to Weybridge rather than mix it up at nightclubs) knew McCartney as a key figure, popular among the cognoscenti for his intelligence, curiosity, and openness to new ideas. Naturally his cultural pursuits weren’t allowed to infringe on his favored pastimes of getting high and sleeping with women, yet he still found time to help launch London’s first countercultural newspaper and bookstore, talk movies with Michaelangelo Antonioni, collect the work of surrealist painter Rene Magritte years before anyone else thought it worthwhile, be seen with one of London’s most beautiful and talented actresses, and — oh yeah. And write all those songs.

The greatness of McCartney’s songwriting is so self-evident as to be beyond dispute. It need only be pointed out that his work is far less simplistic than is often claimed. “When I’m Sixty-Four” may be a light-hearted toe-tapper, but the fear of aging lying beneath its charming façade can ambush an unwary listener (“indicate precisely what you mean to say/Your’s sincerely, ‘Wasting Away’”). “You Never Give Me Your Money” is a heartbreaking confession of the Beatles’ decaying carmaraderie, simultaneously recriminatory and celebratory; I’ll take its stunningly versatile four minutes over Lennon’s chest-thumpingly obvious “God” any day, thank you. And “Penny Lane,” arguably his finest single achievement, is a joyful, smutty, kaleidoscopic remembrance of childhood every bit as mind-blowing as its more lauded companion piece, Lennon’s “Strawberry Fields.” (Spend a half-hour sometime pondering the nurse who “feels as if she’s in a play” but “is anyway.” Your head may explode.)

So how, despite his undeniable achievements, has McCartney acquired his reputation as a lightweight, middlebrow balladeer, cuddly and unthreatening? Truth be told, the fault is mostly his, and goes beyond the admittedly depressing decline in the quality of his work around the mid- to late seventies. The birth of Safe Paul McCartney can be traced to the summer of 1967, when Rebellious, Intellectual Paul McCartney admitted to a BBC reporter that he had not only taken LSD (the first pop star to make such an admission), but found the experience beneficial, even a little fun. The establishment came down swiftly and mercilessly, deriding him as an “irresponsible idiot” and generally making life difficult for every drug-taking pop star from then on. While John Lennon never lost his taste for outrageous remarks, McCartney has made nary an offensive peep since, and by the mid-eighties was confessing in interviews that his own family was “a lot like” that depicted on The Cosby Show. Thus the perception of Paul McCartney as an ordinary family man, a perception that has preserved his privacy while chopping away at his artistic reputation.

Happily, there are signs that McCartney is finally coming out of the woods and achieving parity with his martyred ex-partner. A pair of studio albums reminded the public of both his songwriting prowess (Flaming Pie) and his rock n’ roll pedigree (Run Devil Run); a new biography called Many Years From Now finally gave him due credit for his role in advancing the Beatles’ art; and the tragic death of his wife Linda, as sincere and humble a celebrity’s wife as any you’d hope to meet, reminded the media that a life of simple decency was nothing to sneer at. Of course there will always be naysayers; Yoko Ono, appalled at what she regarded as a slur on her late husband’s memory, shriekingly attacked Many Years From Now as a compendium of lies, claiming McCartney was merely “Saglieri to John’s Mozart” and that McCartney made little contribution to the Beatles other than insuring they all turned up on time. Her remarks, in their utter falsity and paranoia, make her pitiable. Lennon at his angriest never claimed to be the sole genius behind the Beatles. And when, years later in America, he would weep listening to “My Love” or gently croon “Here There and Everywhere” to Yoko from their white grand piano, he demonstrated something that his widow is still too blinded by jealousy to appreciate: that a song that insinuates itself into your heart is never simple, and never easy. The seeming effortlessness comes from genius, know-how, hard work, and an emotional generosity that’s impossible to feign. May we all live to see them receive the respect they deserve.

Originally published on Pop-Culture-Corn around ’99 or so.

Whoever those strange alternate selves turn out to be, I do feel a strong kinship to the kid who watched The A-Team. I was thrown back into his presence on the occasion of TV Land’s A-Team Fandemonium Marathon: 48 hours of dummy bullets, exploding cars, and men soaring balletically through the air. Not to mention lousy acting, weak puns, preposterous celebrity cameos, and enough specimens of Geniune Eighties Hair to start a museum. It’s probably not a good idea to watch anything constantly for two straight days, and sitting in front of The A-Team for more than a few hours inflames the human demand for plausibility into a rage-fueled geyser. “How can Hannibal Smith possibly have an acting career when he’s a wanted fugitive?” you might find yourself demanding of your roommate, or girlfriend, or cat, or the wall. “Who actually thinks Face is that good-looking? How could any doctor with brains think that Murdock is really crazy? How many stupid machines are they going to build out of discarded freezer parts or old wheelbarrows? And why the fuck doesn’t anyone ever get killed?”

But why stop at rampant implausibility when you can add repitition? All tv shows rely on formula to a certain extent, but The A-Team is in a league—a sport—all its own. It established a formula in its first few episodes and stuck to it so rigidly one could easily imagine a software program capable of generating A-Team stories. (Oh look—someone already has.) And although every A-Team fan knows the routine, and since you probably wouldn’t be reading this if reams of gunplay and cheesy jokes aren’t your cup of tea, we nevertheless must revisit, briefly, the well-oiled engine that was an A-Team story.

We begin with the Innocents in Trouble: small-time grocers or farmers or cabdrivers just trying to make an Honest Living, being steadily screwed to the wall by the Evil Bastard and his henchmen, who hold the town in an iron grip of fear. The Innocents then contact the A-Team, represented by one of Col. John “Hannibal” Smith’s array of interchangeable disguises; the team springs Cpt. H.M. “Howlin’ Mad” Murdock out of the local psych ward, dopes Sgt. Bosco “B.A.” Baracus into la-la land (the big lug is scared to fly—ain’t that precious?), and flies to their destination. Hannibal thereupon concocts a plan that invariably requires Lt. Templeton “Faceman” Peck to bully a halfwitted local merchant out of a truckload of dynamite or a crate of fissionable plutonium. At some point, the team will be called upon to assemble some Rube Goldbergian device (like, say, a deisel-powered lettuce cannon—see below), or refurbish a derelict 30-foot yacht, always in a matter of minutes and always to the crisp punctuation of the A-Team’s martial theme music. There may be a setback or two, necessitating an elaborate and thoroughly improbable escape from the Evil Bastard’s clutches, but nobody really gets hurt, and by the end Hannibal is there lighting a cigar, grinning and cackling, “I love it when a plan comes together!”

Do I protest too much? Yes, but only to point out how much The A-Team overcomes in weaving its peculiarly addictive spell. Stick with the show a little longer (say around eight hours or more—I don’t recommend this to anyone with a life) and you develop affection for the show’s silliness and Xerox-like predictability; they’re precisely what make it so fun. An episode of The A-Team is like a Tex Avery cartoon in which the characters fire machine guns and lob grenades instead of pound each other with mallets, and the more idiotic things get, the more pleased the show seems to be with itself. When the team overcomes a group of shotgun-wielding thugs with the aforementioned homemade lettuce cannon, the actors don’t bother attempting a seriousness the scene obviously doesn’t deserve; instead they grin as though they were having the time of their lives. Who wouldn’t?

At the heart of The A-Team, and the idea that still makes it a pleasure to watch, is what the characters call being on the jazz. When you’re on the jazz, nothing can hurt you and you know it—you’re just too damn smart, good-looking, and cool to die, especially when the people out to get you are such idiots. It’s the mindset that leads people to become skydiving instructors or to climb active volcanoes, and while everyone in the A-Team has it, its leader, “Hannibal” Smith, is addicted to it. Intelligent, cunning, and unshakeably convinced of his own invulnerability, Hannibal is one of those talented folks both blessed and cursed to work amongst people who are, almost to a man, complete morons. The worst thing about his job is that it isn’t difficult enough. He’s not happy merely to defeat his opponents; he has to make it look easy, like the kid with the football who stops just a foot from the endzone, seemingly unaware of everyone else hurtling towards him at breakneck speed even as he takes that last lazy step to a touchdown. Hannibal’s cool is damn near unshakeable, and in perfect keeping with the program’s bloodless approach to mayhem; far from being unrealistic, The A-Team is pretty close to how someone like Hannibal would perceive the world. In short, he’s one seriously looney motherfucker, a charming, cocky rogue with a psychotic thirst for violence and danger, like a cross between Dirty Harry and Bugs Bunny. And people thought Murdock was the crazy one.

Like all shows so dependent on formula—Batman comes to mind—The A-Team quickly started to get old, and soon the producers were taking drastic measures to shake things up.
The plots became ridiculous even by The A-Team’s liberal standards, celebrity guests started popping up as themselves (among them Hulk Hogan, Rick James, Joe Namath, William “The Refrigerator” Perry, and Boy George—Boy fucking George) and, in the last season, the program’s premise was completely rewritten: the team was captured by the government and forced to work off its debt to society, not by washing dishes, but by completing missions for smug CIA spook Hunt Stockwell (Robert Vaughan). The team was also saddled with a hideous new character in the person of gibbering wiseass Frankie Santana, a special effects whiz who seemed to have wandered in from a failed sitcom. But the worst failure of The A-Team’s ignoble final season is that, having suffered the humiliation of capture and defeat, Hannibal was never the same. His invincibility was shattered; forced to come and go as Stockwell pleased, he became just another guy stuck working for a prick boss. The fun was gone, and nobody mentioned being on the jazz anymore.

Still, it’s not as though The A-Team didn’t earn the considerable success it enjoyed in its first run. Few shows ever reach such meteoric popularity so quickly, and it’s a testament to the show’s creative team that they got so much right on the first try. From the inspired lunacy of Dwight Schultz as Murdock to the self-effacing Dirk Benedict as the kvetchy Face; from the perfectly overblown Mr. T as, well, himself really, to old Hollywood vet George Peppard, who knew when to just let go and enjoy himself, The A-Team presented an ideal balance of acting and writing from the very start. So specific a mix guaranteed eventual viewer burnout, and tinkering with it could only make it worse. The show’s very success—both popular and artistic—was the biggest factor in its decline.

Who would’ve suspected that The A-Team’s greatest failing was that it was too good?

“I don’t say shit,” the comedian told the crowd. “I’ll smoke a little of it, but I won’t say it.” As pivotal moments in popular entertainment go, it may not quite rank with Dylan going electric at Newport in 1965. But in a town whose comedic taste ran to the it’s-all-in-fun nouveau-minstrelsy of Sinatra and the Rat Pack, to out yourself as a foul-mouthed dope smoker was tantamount to throwing a drink in the Chairman’s face. For George Carlin, it was a shot across the mainstream’s bow. Sick of pandering to the prejudices of an intolerant white middle class, he was ready to risk his livelihood to become the first stand-up of the Woodstock generation.

The idea would have seemed foolhardy even a few years earlier. Occasional mavericks like Lenny Bruce and Dick Gregory notwithstanding, the career of a successful comedian followed a predictable, orderly path: from radio to nightclubs to talk shows to theaters until, with luck, the ultimate reward of movies. Carlin ascended this pyramid as a mainstream comic, and, incredibly, grew a beard and did it all over again. He forced the establishment to re-accept him on his own terms, in the process expanding the very idea of what “mainstream” comedy could be. Gone were the square routines about game shows and TV commercials. In their place came openly drug-flavored ruminations about language, culture, and religion that make up the most familiar body of work of any comic of the last forty years.

Born in 1937 and raised in the then-Irish neighborhood of Morningside Heights, George Carlin had no aspirations to be a revolutionary; his chief aim was to avoid getting his ass kicked. The son of a working mother and an absent father, he honed his verbal gifts on the streets of the Bronx, where a well-timed remark might be all that saved him from a beating by the gang from up the block. Quitting high school to pursue full-time his dream of becoming the next Danny Kaye, he landed his first radio job at nineteen, and soon had worked up a comedy double act with a newsman colleague, Jack Burns. “Burns and Carlin” flirted with edgier, more socially conscious material before soon going their separate ways, but Carlin on his own was too ambitious to risk derailing a promising career. He spent the latter half of the sixties working a hard grind of talk shows, B-movies, and seedy middle-class drinking holes, increasingly aware he had nothing in common with his audiences, and that his own act was becoming an embarrassment to him.

When he finally hoisted his freak flag in 1970, he had the advantages of a well-known name and an ear for the nuances of voice and language that let him mimic everything from a hyperactive AM deejay to a first-generation Irish barfly. Beyond that was the accident of fate that found him in his mid-thirties at a time when, as he put it, “the whole country seems to be either 18 or 50.” Too young to mourn the passing of the social order the sixties had demolished, yet too practical to be swept up by the utopian optimism of the youth movement, he straddled the generation gap with unrivaled ease. He could deconstruct the absurdities of contemporary speech as easily as hit you with a killer fart joke—and in a single routine, too.

This process survives today in the six albums Carlin recorded for Little David records, which contain virtually all of the material for which he remains famous: “Baseball and Football,” “Class Clown,” “God” and, most famously, “Seven Words You Can’t Say on TV” (“shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits”–all he could think of in one sitting). He invented so-called “observational comedy” with a single remark: “Anything we all do–and never talk about–is funny.” His records, like Richard Pryor’s, became valued contraband among underage listeners, prized as highly as joints or Playboys and passed from friend to friend with a ritualistic fervor Jon Stewart likens to a rite of passage.

Carlin’s invention began to flag at around the end of the seventies, and by the start of Reagan’s second term drug use and ill health had sapped most of the vitality from his act. As comics like Steve Martin and Robin Williams became the new innovators in stand-up, the public image of Carlin froze into a caricature of the aging hippie, churning out pothead wisecracks (“Know how you can tell when a moth farts? He flies in a straight line.”) for audiences as old and out of it as he was. The image was not without truth—for a time.

For in the early nineties Carlin, who had already proved American lives could have a second act, reinvented himself again, this time as a raging, misanthropic prophet of doom, whose comic distance from life had grown so vast it literally encompassed the entire cosmos. Gone were the stoner’s winsome, “D’ya ever notice—?” wonderings; in their place, a pissed-off old man who paced the stage like a penned lion, unable to hide his contempt for a frightened culture eager to trade its freedoms for the illusory comforts of euphemism and “sneakers with lights in them.” In the world of comedy, where groundbreaking talents succumb to either early death (Bruce, Sam Kinison), infirmity (Pryor), or embarrassing movie careers (Williams), such a transformation is unprecedented. Perhaps it’s not so outrageous to compare Carlin to Dylan, another artist who’s found renewed vigor among the disappointments of growing old. Both forever expanded the vocabulary of their medium, and both offer permanent warning against ever dismissing an artist as “past his prime”–though Dylan, it must be said, has yet to come up with a really good fart joke.

A scant few months after announcing he would no longer write and draw “Peanuts,” Charles Schulz died of a heart attack Saturday, just as his final comic strip was rolling of the presses of the more than 2,000 newspapers that carried it. We’d been prepared to see the characters leave, but there was always hope — Schulz was confident that the cancer that had forced his retirement would subside, allowing him to work on the screenplays he’d been planning, and by which he hoped to bring Charlie Brown and the rest back to the screen.

Now that last hope is gone. We’re left with what we began with: the dozens of “Peanuts” books that have remained in print for nearly five decades, and the best way to introduce any reader to Charlie Brown’s sad yet optimistic world. These were among the first books I remember reading, certainly the first books I ever came to love. The boys’ fiction I grew up with was giddy, preposterous fun, adventure tales of children in space or traveling through time or saving their towns from bank robbers. “Peanuts” was the first time I and many others of my generation recognized ourselves in print. I was the bespectacled Linus, naive and insecure and tormented by an older sister, and I was Snoopy, a backyard adventurer with an imagination powerful enough to make reality an irrelevant detail. I was bossy, arrogant Lucy — to be that confident, even for a day! — and simple, sedate Marcy, as loyal and steadfast a friend as you could hope for.

And I was Charlie Brown, but then, we all were Charlie Brown. Anyone who doesn’t know exactly how Charlie Brown feels when, walking home after another walloping on the baseball field, he wonders “How can we lose when we’re so sincere?” has been living a coddled, spoiled life. Bad things happen to people who don’t deserve them in the slightest, and most of us have felt like we’ve received far more than our share of bad luck from time to time. Too bad. Though Charlie Brown’s team suffered the most humiliating defeats in baseball history, he kept going; he never forfeited a game. You can either complain about it and give up, or get back on the mound and keep pitching.

If there’s a heaven for cartoon characters, I hope Schroeder loosens up and gives Lucy a big wet kiss; I hope Linus gets to enjoy a quiet moment with his blanket, without fear of reprisal by older sisters, hyperactive beagles, or vengeful blanket-hating grandmothers; I hope Peppermint Patty gets an A on a term paper she spent fifteen minutes writing. And like everyone else, I hope Charlie Brown finally gets to kick the football.

We’ll never see it happen now, but maybe that’s OK. Deep down, Charlie Brown knows winning isn’t everything. When he asked Linus why he bothered playing day after day, dragging himself and his frail hopes to the mound despite the full certainty of getting his ass kicked, he replied, “Probably because it makes you happy.” It’s a theme that applied to all of these terminally frustrated characters, whether it was Lucy and her unrequited crush on Schroeder or Snoopy’s unending failure to shoot down the Red Baron. Maybe that’s why the strip, despite its sadness, always made us smile; maybe that’s why I always thought of the “Peanuts” gang as kids I would want to know. And maybe that’s why saying goodbye to them is so sad.

February 14, 2000