ANTITUSSIVE

By Mario Vargas Llosa The New Republic

It has often happened to me, at book fairs or in bookstores, that a gentleman approaches me and asks me for a signature. "It is for my wife, my young daughter, or my mother," he explains. "She is a great reader andloves literature." Immediately I ask: "And what about you? Don't you like to read?" The answer is almost always the same: "Of course I like to read, but I am a very busy person." I have heard this explanation dozens of times: this man and many thousands of men like him have so many important thingsto do, so many obligations, so many responsibilities in life, that they cannot waste their precious time buried in a novel, a book of poetry, or aliterary essay for hours and hours. According to this widespread conception, literature is a dispensable activity, no doubt lofty and useful for cultivating sensitivity and good manners, but essentially an entertainment, an adornment that only people with time for recreation can afford. It is something to fit in between sports, the movies, a game of bridge or chess; and it can be sacrificed without scruple when one "prioritizes" the tasks and the duties that are indispensable in the struggle of life.

It seems clear that literature has become more and more a female activity. In bookstores, at conferences or public readings by writers, and even in university departments dedicated to the humanities, the women clearly outnumber the men. The explanation traditionally given is that middle-class women read more because they work fewer hours than men, and so many of them feel that they can justify more easily than men the time that they devoteto fantasy and illusion. I am somewhat allergic to explanations that dividemen and women into frozen categories and attribute to each sex its characteristic virtues and shortcomings; but there is no doubt that there are fewer and fewer readers of literature, and that among the savingremnant of readers women predominate.

This is the case almost everywhere. In Spain, for example, a recent survey organized by the General Society of Spanish Writers revealed that half of that country's population has never read a book. The survey also revealed that in the minority that does read, the number of women who admitted to reading surpasses the number of men by 6.2 percent, a difference that appears to be increasing. I am happy for these women, but I feel sorry for these men, and for the millions of human beings who could read but have decided not to read.

They earn my pity not only because they are unaware of the pleasure that they are missing, but also because I am convinced that a society without literature, or a society in which literature has been relegated--like some hidden vice--to the margins of social and personal life, and transformed into something like a sectarian cult, is a society condemned to become spiritually barbaric, and even to jeopardize its freedom. I wish to offer a few arguments against the idea of literature as a luxury pastime, and in favor of viewing it as one of the most primary and necessary undertakingsof the mind, an irreplaceable activity for the formation of citizens in a modern and democratic society, a society of free individuals.

We live in the era of the specialization of knowledge, thanks to the prodigious development of science and technology and to the consequent fragmentation of knowledge into innumerable parcels and compartments. This cultural trend is, if anything, likely to be accentuated in years to come.

To be sure, specialization brings many benefits. It allows for deeper exploration and greater experimentation; it is the very engine of progress. Yet it also has negative consequences, for it eliminates those common intellectual and cultural traits that permit men and women to co-exist, to communicate, to feel a sense of solidarity. Specialization leads to a lack of social understanding, to the division of human beings into ghettos of technicians and specialists. The specialization of knowledge requires specialized languages and increasingly arcane codes, as information becomes more and more specific and compartmentalized. This is the particularism and the division against which an old proverb warned us: do not focus too much on the branch or the leaf, lest you forget that they are part of a tree, or too much on the tree, lest you forget that it is part of a forest.Awareness of the existence of the forest creates the feeling of generality, the feeling of belonging, that binds society together and prevents it from disintegrating into a myriad of solipsistic particularities. The solipsism of nations and individuals produces paranoia and delirium, distortions of reality that generate hatred, wars, and even genocide.

In our time, science and technology cannot play an integrating role, precisely because of the infinite richness of knowledge and the speed ofits evolution, which have led to specialization and its obscurities. But literature has been, and will continue to be, as long as it exists, one of the common denominators of human experience through which human beings may recognize themselves and converse with each other, no matter how different their professions, their life plans, their geographical and cultural locations, their personal circumstances. It has enabled individuals, in all the particularities of their lives, to transcend history: as readers of Cervantes, Shakespeare, Dante, and Tolstoy, we understand each other across space and time, and we feel ourselves to be members of the same species because, in the works that these writers created, we learn what we share as human beings, what remains common in all of us under the broad range of differences that separate us. Nothing better protects a human being against the stupidity of prejudice, racism, religious or political sectarianism,and exclusivist nationalism than this truth that invariably appears in great literature: that men and women of all nations and places are essentially equal, and that only injustice sows among them discrimination, fear, and exploitation.Nothing teaches us better than literature to see, in ethnic and culturaldifferences, the richness of the human patrimony, and to prize those differences as a manifestation of humanity's multi-faceted creativity.

Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure, of course; but it is also an experience of learning what and how we are, in our human integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams, and our ghosts, alone and in relationships that link us to others, in our public image and in the secret recesses of our consciousness.

This complex sum of contradictory truths--as Isaiah Berlin called them--constitutes the very substance of the human condition. In today's world, this totalizing and living knowledge of a human being may be found only in literature. Not even the other branches of the humanities--not philosophy, history, or the arts, and certainly not the social sciences--have been able to preserve this integrating vision, this universalizing discourse. The humanities, too, have succumbed to the cancerous division and subdivision of knowledge, isolating themselves in increasingly segmented and technical sectors whose ideas and vocabularies lie beyond the reach of the common woman and man. Some critics andtheorists would even like to change literature into a science.

But this will never happen, because fiction does not exist to investigate only a singleprecinct of experience. It exists to enrich through the imagination the entirety of human life, which cannot be dismembered, disarticulated, or reduced to a series of schemas or formulas without disappearing. This is the meaning of Proust's observation that "real life, at last enlightened and revealed, the only life fully lived, is literature." He was not exaggerating, nor was he expressing only his love for his own vocation. He was advancing the particular proposition that as a result of literature life is etter understood and better lived; and that living life more fully necessitates living it and sharing it with others.

The brotherly link that literature establishes among human beings, compelling them to enter into dialogue and making them conscious of acommon origin and a common goal, transcends all temporal barriers. Literature transports us into the past and links us to those who in bygone eras plotted, enjoyed, and dreamed through those texts that have come down tous, texts that now allow us also to enjoy and to dream.

This feeling of membership in the collective human experience across time and space is the highest achievement of culture, and nothing contributes more to its renewal in every generation than literature. It always irritated Borges when he was asked, "What is the use of literature?" It seemed to him a stupid question, to which he would reply: "No one would ask what is the use of a canary's song or a beautifulsunset." If such beautiful things exist, and if, thanks to them, life is even for an instant less ugly and less sad, is it not petty to seek practical justifications? But the question is a good one. For novels and poems arenot like the sound of birdsong or the spectacle of the sun sinking into the horizon, because they were not created by chance or by nature. They are human creations, and it is therefore legitimate to ask how and why theycame into the world, and what is their purpose, and why they have lasted solong. Literary works are born, as shapeless ghosts, in the intimacy of a writer's consciousness, projected into it by the combined strength of the unconscious, and the writer's sensitivity to the world around him, and the writer's emotions; and it is these things to which the poet or thenarrator, in a struggle with words, gradually gives form, body, movement, rhythm, harmony, and life. An artificial life, to be sure, a life imagined, a life made of language--yet men and women seek out this artificial life, some frequently, others sporadically, because real life falls short for them,and is incapable of offering them what they want. Literature does not begin to exist through the work of a single individual. It exists only when it is adopted by others and becomes a part of social life--when it becomes,thanks to reading, a shared experience. One of its first beneficial effects takes place at the level of language. A community without a written literature expresses itself with lessprecision, with less richness of nuance, and with less clarity than a community whose principal instrument of communication, the word, has been cultivated and perfected by means of literary texts. A humanity without reading. untouched by literature, would resemble a community of deaf-mutes and aphasics, afflicted by tremendous problems of communication due to its crude and rudimentary language. This is true for individuals, too. A person who does not read, or reads little, or reads only trash, is a person with an impediment: he can speak much but he will say little, because hisvocabulary is deficient in the means for self-expression.

This is not only a verbal limitation. It represents also a limitation in intellect and in imagination. It is a poverty of thought, for the simple reason that ideas, the concepts through which we grasp the secrets of our condition, do not exist apart from words. We learn how to speak correctly--and deeply, rigorously, and subtly--from good literature, and only from good literature. No other discipline or branch of the arts can substitute for literature in crafting the language that people need to communicate. To speak well, to have at one's disposal a rich and diverse language, to be able to find the appropriate expression for every idea and every emotion that we want to communicate, is to be better prepared to think, to teach, to learn, to converse, and also to fantasize, to dream, to feel. In a surreptitious way, words reverberate in all our actions, even in those actions that seem far removed from language. And as language evolved, thanks to literature, and reached high levels of refinement and manners, it increased the possibility of human enjoyment. Literature has even served to confer upon love and desire and the sexualact itself the status of artistic creation. Without literature, eroticism would not exist. Love and pleasure would be poorer, they would lack delicacy and exquisiteness, they would fail to attain to the intensity that literary fantasy offers. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that a couple who have read Garcilaso, Petrarch, Gongora, or Baudelaire value pleasure and experience pleasure more than illiterate people who have been made into idiots by television's soap operas. In an illiterate world, love and desire would be no different from what satisfies animals, nor would they transcend the crude fulfillment of elementary instincts. Nor are the audiovisual media equipped to replace literature in this taskof teaching human beings to use with assurance and with skill the extraordinarily rich possibilities that language encompasses. On the contrary, the audiovisual media tend to relegate words to a secondary level with respect to images, which are the primordial language of these media, and to constrain language to its oral expression, to its indispensable minimum, far from its written dimension. To define a film or a television program as "literary" is an elegant way of saying that it is boring. For this reason, literary programs on the radio or on television rarely capture the public. So far as I know, the only exception to this rule was Bernard Pivot's program, Apostrophes, in France. And this leads me to think thatnot only is literature indispensable for a full knowledge and a full mastery of language, but its fate is linked also and indissolubly with the fate of the book, that industrial product that many are now declaring obsolete.

This brings me to Bill Gates. He was in Madrid not long ago and visited the Royal Spanish Academy, which has embarked upon a joint venture with Microsoft. Among other things, Gates assured the members of the Academythat he would personally guarantee that the letter "ñ" would never be removed from computer software--a promise that allowed four hundred million Spanish speakers on five continents to breathe a sigh of relief, since the banishment of such an essential letter from cyberspace would have created monumental problems. Immediately after making his amiable concession to the Spanish language, however, Gates, before even leaving the premises of the Academy, avowed in a press conference that he expected to accomplish his highest goal before he died. That goal, he explained, is to put an end to paper and then to books.

In his judgment, books are anachronistic objects. Gates argued thatcomputer screens are able to replace paper in all the functions that paper has heretofore assumed. He also insisted that, in addition to being less onerous, computers take up less space, and are more easily transportable; and also that the transmission of news and literature by these electronic media, instead of by newspapers and books, will have the ecological advantage of stopping the destruction of forests, a cataclysm that is a consequence of the paper industry. People will continue to read, Gates assured his listeners, but they will read on computer screens, and consequently there will be more chlorophyll in the environment.

I was not present at Gates's little discourse; I learned these details from the press. Had I been there I would have booed Gates for proclaiming shamelessly his intention to send me and my colleagues, the writers of books, directly to the unemployment line. And I would have vigorously disputed his analysis. Can the screen really replace the book in all its aspects? I am not so certain. I am fully aware of the enormous revolution that new technologies such as the Internet have caused in the fields of communication and the sharing of information, and I confess that the Internet provides invaluable help to me every day in my work; but my gratitude for these extraordinary conveniences does not imply a belief that the electronic screen can replace paper, or that reading on a computer can stand in for literary reading. That is a chasm that I cannot cross. Icannot accept the idea that a non-functional or non-pragmatic act of reading, one that seeks neither information nor a useful and immediate communication,can integrate on a computer screen the dreams and the pleasures of words with the same sensation of intimacy, the same mental concentration and spiritual isolation, that may be achieved by the act of reading a book.

Perhaps this a prejudice resulting from lack of practice, and from a long association of literature with books and paper. But even though I enjoy surfing the Web in search of world news, I would never go to the screen to read a poem by Gongora or a novel by Onetti or an essay by Paz, because Iam certain that the effect of such a reading would not be the same. I am convinced, although I cannot prove it, that with the disappearance of the book, literature would suffer a serious blow, even a mortal one. The term "literature" would not disappear, of course. Yet it would almost certainly be used to denote a type of text as distant from what we understand as literature today as soap operas are from the tragedies of Sophocles and Shakespeare.

There is still another reason to grant literature an important place in the life of nations. Without it, the critical mind, which is the real engine of historical change and the best protector of liberty, would suffer an irreparable loss. This is because all good literature is radical, and poses radical questions about the world in which we live. In all great literary texts, often without their authors' intending it, a seditious inclinationis present.Literature says nothing to those human beings who are satisfied with theirlot, who are content with life as they now live it. Literature is the food of the rebellious spirit, the promulgator of non-conformities, the refuge for those who have too much or too little in life. One seeks sanctuary in literature so as not to be unhappy and so as not to be incomplete. To ride alongside the scrawny Rocinante and the confused Knight on the fields of La Mancha, to sail the seas on the back of a whale with Captain Ahab, to drink arsenic with Emma Bovary, to become an insect with Gregor Samsa: these are all ways that we have invented to divest ourselves of the wrongs and the impositions of this unjust life, a life that forces us always to be thesame person when we wish to be many different people, so as to satisfy the many desires that possess us.

Literature pacifies this vital dissatisfaction only momentarily--but inthis miraculous instant, in this provisional suspension of life, literary illusion lifts and transports us outside of history, and we become citizens of a timeless land, and in this way immortal. We become more intense, richer, more complicated, happier, and more lucid than we are in the constrained routine of ordinary life. When we close the book and abandon literary fiction, we return to actual existence and compare it to the splendid land that we have just left. What a disappointment awaits us! Yeta tremendous realization also awaits us, namely, that the fantasized life of the novel is better--more beautiful and more diverse, more comprehensible and more perfect--than the life that we live while awake, a lifeconditioned by the limits and the tedium of our condition. In this way, goodliterature, genuine literature, is always subversive, unsubmissive, rebellious: a challenge to what exists.

How could we not feel cheated after reading War and Peace or Remembrance of Things Past and returning to our world of insignificant details, of boundaries and prohibitions that lie in wait everywhere and, with eachstep, corrupt our illusions? Even more than the need to sustain the continuity of culture and to enrich language, the greatest contribution of literature to human progress is perhaps to remind us (without intending to, in the majority of cases) that the world is badly made; and that those who pretend to the contrary, the powerful and the lucky, are lying; and that the world can be improved, and made more like the worlds that our imagination and our language are able to create. A free and democratic society must have responsible and critical citizens conscious of the need continuously to examine the world that we inhabit and to try, even though it is more and more an impossible task, to make it more closely resemble the world that we would like to inhabit. And there is no better means of fomenting dissatisfaction with existence than the reading of good literature; no better means of forming critical and independent citizens who will not be manipulated by those who govern them, and who are endowed with a permanent spiritual mobility and a vibrant imagination.

Still, to call literature seditious because it sensitizes a reader's consciousness to the imperfections of the world does not mean--as churches and governments seem to think it means when they establish censorship--that literary texts will provoke immediate social upheavals or accelerate revolutions. The social and political effects of a poem, a play, or a novel cannot be foreseen, because they are not collectively made or collectively experienced. They are created by individuals and they are read by individuals, who vary enormously in the conclusions that they draw from their writing and their reading. For this reason, it is difficult, or even impossible, to establish precise patterns. Moreover, the social consequences of a work of literature may have little to do with its aesthetic quality. A mediocre novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe seems to have played a decisiverole in raising social and political consciousness of the horrors of slavery in the United States. The fact that these effects of literature are difficult to identify does not imply that they do not exist. The important point is that they are effects brought about by the actions of citizens whose personalities have been formed in part by books.

Good literature, while temporarily relieving human dissatisfaction,actually increases it, by developing a critical and non-conformist attitude toward life. It might even be said that literature makes human beings more likely to be unhappy. To live dissatisfied, and at war with existence, is to seek things that may not be there, to condemn oneself to fight futile battles, like the battles that Colonel Aureliano Buendía fought in One Hundred Years of Solitude, knowing full well that he would lose them all. All this may be true. Yet it is also true that without rebellion against the mediocrity and the squalor of life, we would still live in a primitive state, and history would have stopped. The autonomous individual would not have been created, science and technology would not have progressed, human rights would not have been recognized, freedom would not have existed. All these things are born of unhappiness, of acts of defiance against a life perceived as insufficient or intolerable. For this spirit that scorns life as it is--and searches with the madness of Don Quixote, whose insanity derived from the reading of chivalric novels--literature has served as a great spur.

Let us attempt a fantastic historical reconstruction. Let us imagine aworld without literature, a humanity that has not read poems or novels. In this kind of atrophied civilization, with its puny lexicon in which groans and ape-like gesticulations would prevail over words, certain adjectives would not exist. Those adjectives include: quixotic, Kafkaesque, Rabelaisian, Orwellian, sadistic, and masochistic, all terms of literary origin. To be sure, we would still have insane people, and victims of paranoia and persecution complexes, and people with uncommon appetites and outrageous excesses, and bipeds who enjoy inflicting or receiving pain. But we would not have learned to see, behind these extremes of behavior that are prohibited by the norms of our culture, essential characteristics of the human condition. We would not have discovered our own traits, as only the talents of Cervantes, Kafka, Rabelais, Orwell, de Sade, and Sacher-Masoch have revealed them to us.

When the novel Don Quixote de la Mancha appeared, its first readers madefun of this extravagant dreamer, as well as the rest of the characters in the novel. Today we know that the insistence of the caballero de la triste figura on seeing giants where there were windmills, and on acting in his seemingly absurd way, is really the highest form of generosity, and a means of protest against the misery of this world in the hope of changing it. Our very notions of the ideal, and of idealism, so redolent with a positive moral connotation, would not be what they are, would not be clear and respected values, had they not been incarnated in the protagonist of anovel through the persuasive force of Cervantes's genius. The same can be said of that small and pragmatic female Quixote, Emma Bovary, who fought with ardor to live the splendid life of passion and luxury that she came to know through novels. Like a butterfly, she came too close to the flame and was burned in the fire.

The inventions of all great literary creators open our eyes to unknown aspects of our own condition. They enable us to explore and to understand more fully the common human abyss. When we say "Borgesian," the word immediately conjures up the separation of our minds from the rational order of reality and the entry into a fantastic universe, a rigorous and elegant mental construction, almost always labyrinthine and arcane, and riddledwith literary references and allusions, whose singularities are not foreign tous because in them we recognize hidden desires and intimate truths of our own personality that took shape only thanks to the literary creation of Jorge Luis Borges. The word "Kafkaesque" comes to mind, like the focus mechanism of those old cameras with their accordion arms, every time we feel threatened, as defenseless individuals, by the oppressive machines of power that have caused so much pain and injustice in the modern world--the authoritarian regimes, the vertical parties, the intolerant churches, the asphyxiating bureaucrats. Without the short stories and the novels of that tormented Jew from Prague who wrote in German and lived always on the lookout, we would not have been able to understand the impotent feeling of the isolated individual, or the terror of persecuted and discriminated minorities, confronted with the all-embracing powers that can smash themand eliminate them without the henchmen even showing their faces.

The adjective "Orwellian," first cousin of "Kafkaesque," gives a voice to the terrible anguish, the sensation of extreme absurdity, that wasgenerated by totalitarian dictatorships of the twentieth century, the most sophisticated, cruel, and absolute dictatorships in history, in their control of the actions and the psyches of the members of a society. In1984, George Orwell described in cold and haunting shades a humanity subjugatedto Big Brother, an absolute lord who, through an efficient combination of terror and technology, eliminated liberty, spontaneity, and equality, and transformed society into a beehive of automatons. In this nightmarishworld, language also obeys power, and has been transformed into "newspeak," purified of all invention and all subjectivity, metamorphosed into a string of platitudes that ensure the individual's slavery to the system. It istrue that the sinister prophecy of 1984 did not come to pass, and totalitarian communism in the Soviet Union went the way of totalitarian fascism in Germany and elsewhere; and soon thereafter it began to deteriorate also in China, and in anachronistic Cuba and North Korea. But the danger is never completely dispelled, and the word "Orwellian" continues to describe the danger, and to help us to understand it.

So literature's unrealities, literature's lies, are also a precious vehicle for the knowledge of the most hidden of human realities. The truths that it reveals are not always flattering; and sometimes the image of ourselvesthat emerges in the mirror of novels and poems is the image of a monster. This happens when we read about the horrendous sexual butchery fantasized by de Sade, or the dark lacerations and brutal sacrifices that fill the cursed books of Sacher-Masoch and Bataille. At times the spectacle is so offensive and ferocious that it becomes irresistible. Yet the worst in these pages is not the blood, the humiliation, the abject love of torture; the worst isthe discovery that this violence and this excess are not foreign to us, that they are a profound part of humanity. These monsters eager fortransgression are hidden in the most intimate recesses of our being; and from the shadow where they live they seek a propitious occasion to manifest themselves, to impose the rule of unbridled desire that destroys rationality, community, and even existence. And it was not science that first ventured into these tenebrous places in the human mind, and discovered the destructive and the self-destructive potential that also shapes it. It was literature that made this discovery. A world without literature would be partly blind to these terrible depths, which we urgently need to see. Uncivilized, barbarian, devoid of sensitivity and crude of speech, ignorant and instinctual, inept at passion and crude at love, this world without literature, this nightmare that I am delineating, would have as its principal traits conformism and the universal submission of humankind to power. In this sense, it would also be a purely animalistic world. Basic instincts would determine the daily practices of a life characterized bythe struggle for survival, and the fear of the unknown, and the satisfaction of physical necessities. There would be no place for the spirit. In thisworld, moreover, the crushing monotony of living would be accompanied by the sinister shadow of pessimism, the feeling that human life is what it had to be and that it will always be thus, and that no one and nothing can changeit. When one imagines such a world, one is tempted to picture primitives in loincloths, the small magic-religious communities that live at the margins of modernity in Latin America, Oceania, and Africa. But I have a different failure in mind. The nightmare that I am warning about is the result not of under-development but of over-development. As a consequence of technology and our subservience to it, we may imagine a future society full ofcomputer screens and speakers, and without books, or a society in which books--that is, works of literature--have become what alchemy became in the era of physics: an archaic curiosity, practiced in the catacombs of the media civilization by a neurotic minority. I am afraid that this cyberneticworld, in spite of its prosperity and its power, its high standard of living and its scientific achievement would be profoundly uncivilized and utterly soulless--a resigned humanity of post-literary automatons who haveabdicated freedom.It is highly improbable, of course, that this macabre utopia will ever comeabout. The end of our story, the end of history, has not yet been written, and it is not pre-determined. What we will become depends entirely on our vision and our will. But if we wish to avoid the impoverishment of our imagination, and the disappearance of the precious dissatisfaction that refines our sensibility and teaches us to speak with eloquence and rigor, and the weakening of our freedom, then we must act. More precisely, we mustread.

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MARIO VARGAS LLOSA's new book, The Feast of the Goat, will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in November. He is professor of Ibero-American Literature and Culture at Georgetown University.Copyright 2001, The New Republic

By Nono Alfonso, S.J.

IN THE LAST elections, a case was filed before the Supreme Court challenging the electoral involvement of Eddie Villanueva, Mike Velarde, the Iglesia ni Cristo, among others, on the grounds that it violated the constitutional provision on the separation of Church and State. Outside of the electoral season, every time Jaime Cardinal Sin or the Catholic bishops issue a statement concerning government or the country's political situation, critics complain that the Church is meddling in politics, thereby violating the sacred democratic principle of separation of Church and State.

Indeed, the 1987 Constitution provides that "the separation of Church and State shall be inviolable," (Art. II, Sec. 6) and that "no law shall be made respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" (Art III, Sec. 5). Legal luminaries, such as Fr. Joaquin Bernas, S.J. who was a member of the 1986 Constitutional Commission, have time and again explained that the separation clause only means two things and these the above-cited Bill of Rights provision explicitly states: first, that the government will not establish any religion; and secondly, that every citizen enjoys freedom of religion. It is thus argued that pastors who run for political office or church people who give their opinion about politics do not violate the constitutional principle of separation of Church and State. Still, as surveys tell us, the popular opinion is: the separation clause covers more ground than the Constitution provides, indeed that the two are distinct entities and "never the twain shall meet."

The United States is facing the same dilemma. In recent years, there has been much controversy there over the extent or scope of this constitutional principle. Cases have been filed against the practice of prayer in public schools, and against the teaching in schools of the Evolution Theory which challenges the biblical account about the creation of man. Of late, a controversy erupted over a stone image of the Ten Commandments that was exhibited in a public building. What all this points to is that more than being a crystal clear concept, the separation principle is a very ambiguous one. Increasingly, academic scholars and legal practitioners are finding out that this principle is by no means a simple one.

One such legal scholar is Philip Hamburger who, in 2002, came out with a thick book (500 pages, Harvard University Press) on the subject. A law professor at the University of Chicago and a long-time columnist of the New Yorker, Hamburger challenges conventional wisdom and contends in "Separation of Church and State" that the constitutional history of the principle is in fact not a long one. Many Americans, he says, think that the principle has been enshrined in their constitution from its ratification in the 18th century. But this, he argues, is only a myth. To support his claim, Hamburger traces the evolution of the principle in the history of the nation. The starting point of course is the First Amendment which was drafted in the 18th century by the US Congress to further strengthen the Federal Constitution. The First Amendment, like Section 5 of our Bill of Rights, provides that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...."

How this came to mean separation (as it is now widely interpreted), according to Hamburger, runs directly counter to the intention of the people of that time. Separation, he insists, would have been the farthest thing in the mind of the Americans in the 18th century. The Americans then were a religious lot. (Secularism became a phenomenon only in the 20th century.) They believed they were being called to be a Christian nation and that their faith must be reflected in all dimensions of their lives. Note that at that time it was common practice among states to adopt an official religion. For example, in England, from which the new American nation had broken off and, the Church of England was the official religion. The faithful of the state religion enjoyed privileges, such as state-funded salaries for its ministers. On the other hand, members of the less-favored denominations were persecuted and punished.

It was in this context that the First Amendment was adopted. The battle cry was for the non-establishment of any religion by the state and the freedom of citizens to belong to any religious sect without being discriminated against. Certainly, not the separation of religion from government. Originally therefore, the First Amendment was introduced to limit government. In the 19th century however, the emphasis shifted. The Amendment was reinterpreted to limit religion. It was also claimed that from the start, the separation of the Church and State was always guaranteed.

Such was the claim of those who, like Thomas Jefferson, envisioned a society "unburdened by the customs of their forefathers or the authority of their ministers." Some Protestant sects feared the growing immigrant Catholic population and saw the latter's hierarchical and "popish" religion as inimical to their ethos of individual independence and personal authority. So they pushed for "the separation of a church and state." Some so-called "secular" and "liberal" groups even called for a "total separation of church and state." They abhorred morality in government and advocated the abolition of religious holidays (imagine working on Christmas Day!) and the abandonment by government of its concern for the poor since charity was the domain of the Church.

Although these three main groups would be influential in shaping public opinion, the definitive word on the matter only came in the 20th century. In 1947, in the landmark case of "Everson v Board of Education," the US Supreme Court ruled that separation was enshrined in the First Amendment. Significantly, its decision would become the foundational jurisprudence of future cases. Despite this, however, the controversy over the nature, scope and extent of the separation principle rages till now. In the last analysis, Hamburger concludes, "there are myriad connections between religion and government that do not amount to an establishment, let alone a full union of church and state." More to the point, "union and separation are overgeneralizations between which lies much middle ground."

The death of Bob Burchfield (or 'RWB' as he was always known to his staff, in the manner of those days) has robbed English lexicography of a scholar of international stature. He was a mixture of Johnson and Fowler, recording and documenting the vocabulary of English with painstaking detail, a scholar's neutrality, but with occasional tinges both of linguistic purism and of humour.

When he was appointed Editor of the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary in 1957 (a post which he held until 1986), he put aside his Middle English research in favour of the study of the modern lexicon, but never lost the dogged rigour in his medieval work. He joined the ranks of a group of distinguished medieval scholars from New Zealand central to scholarly work on the language in Oxford for a generation. Indeed, he was single-handedly responsible for re-establishing a tradition of historical lexical research on the OED which had evaporated with the disbanding of the original OED staff on the completion of the First Edition of the Dictionary (1884-1928). As an academic colleague of C. T. Onions (one of the editors of the First Edition) in the 1950s he ensured editorial continuity between the early editors of the Dictionary and their modern successors.

He will perhaps be best remembered for two things: for championing the 'varieties' of world English, and ensuring that these were accorded their rightful place in the Dictionary, and as the editor responsible for including the previously 'taboo' Anglo-Saxon four-letter words in the OED. The editorial traditions of the OED today owe much to Bob Burchfield's no-nonsense, practical approach to a task of gargantuan proportions. He didn't suffer fools gladly; he didn't suffer fools at all.

John Simpson, Chief Editor, Oxford English Dictionary

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Obituary published in The Daily Register, The Times, Tuesday 6 July 2004

Robert Burchfield

Lexicographer whose monument is the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary whose four volumes occupied him for 30 years.

Robert Burchfield became internationally known as a distinguished and productive scholarly lexicographer with the publication between 1972 and 1986 of the four volumes of the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, the fruits of 30 years of immensely hard and dedicated work. The original OED - with which the name of Sir James Murray is enduringly associated - was essentially a monument to Victorian scholarship, published in instalments between 1884 and 1928; after which the work of recording the English language was seen as completed and the editorial staff was disbanded. A quarter of a century later the publishers, Oxford University Press, recognised the need to respond to growth and change in the language, and in 1957 Burchfield was appointed Editor of the Supplement.

Robert William Burchfield became a lexicographer rather accidentally. His parents were non-academic, small-town New Zealanders, but Burchfield proved an unusually clever student at Wanganui Technical College, and by 1948 he was a graduate of, and junior lecturer at, Victoria University College, Wellington.

This brought the chance of a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford, though only two New Zealanders were selected annually and he was warned that a successful candidate needed to be 'a mix of Achilles and Jesus Christ'. Certainly both academic and sporting prowess were required. Fortunately his career at Victoria University College had been interrupted by five years' war service in the Royal New Zealand Artillery, the last two actively in Italy, and this had enabled him to play rugby for the New Zealand Forces against the South African Forces. The Springboks won, but his performance was sufficient to clear the sporting hurdle, and he went up to Magdalen College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar in 1949. C. T. Onions, who had largely been responsible for the completion of the OED after Murray's death in 1915, was then Magdalen's librarian.

Burchfield's academic career was highly promising - he was painstaking as well as brilliant, and his tutors complained only of some prolixity. Although his first book was a study of New Zealand, written with his first wife and published in 1953, he intended to be a medieval scholar and was for a while a research student with J. R. R. Tolkien as his supervisor. Tolkien and Onions were his principal mentors.

By 1957 he was a lecturer in English Language at Christ Church, working on the Middle English text known as the Ormulum, and was honorary secretary of the Early English Text Society. But the University Press had determined to bring the OED out of limbo; Onions recommended Burchfield to OUP's Dan Davin, and he was offered the task.

There was some clannishness here. Davin was himself a New Zealander; there was then a firm Oxford belief - not solely based on Eric Partridge's known excellence - that New Zealanders were unusually good lexicographers of the English language; and if Burchfield was not then a lexicographer, he was unarguably a scholarly New Zealander.

He had, in fact, reservations about this change in direction and, insisting that he should also continue as a university teacher, he also became a fellow and tutor in English Language at St Peter's College - an arrangement that many would regard as holding two full-time jobs. There was, too, a strong practical consideration: he was 34 with a wife and three children, Christ Church paid £500 a year, the press offered £1,500. The press had got it wrong with Murray in 1879, expecting the OED to take ten, rather than nearly 50, years to compile, and it again got the calculation wrong with Burchfield. The Supplement, it thought, would be a single 1,275-page volume compiled in seven years. In the event it took almost 30 years, four volumes and some 6,000 pages.

This miscalculation was small, though, compared with others such as that for The Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, the 12 volumes of which appeared between 1937 and 2002, or Die Afrikaanse Woordeboek, the first instalment of which appeared in 1950, and which has now reached the letter 'O'.) The scope proved huge since Burchfield was determined to include what the OED had omitted, overseas English of all kinds and indecent words of all periods; the publication of Webster's Third in 1961 emphasised the scale of American vocabulary and of the scientific and technical terms needing collection, and everyday jargon and slang had proliferated.

There were legal problems too: it needed a High Court ruling to support his lexicographer's inclusion of unfavourable senses of the word Jew (Burchfield received some anonymous death threats on this score), and organisations such as Weight Watchers Inc and the manufacturers of Yale locks were with difficulty persuaded that a dictionary maker had the right to record usage and that this would not damage their trademarks. He started in 1957 with no colleagues, no collection of lexicographical evidence and just five dictionaries of the Oxford family. By the time he retired there were more than 20.

Over the years as Supplement editor and, from 1971 to 1984, as Chief Editor of the Oxford English Dictionaries, he built up a staff of 30 which pressed on with the main task and spawned the valuable derivative dictionaries. He became accustomed to completing a full day's work and then returning after dinner to spend several more office hours in what he called "the invisible embroidery behind the scenes".

Stamina, obduracy, a gift for handling people - among them the brilliant, waspish Marghanita Laski, who devotedly sent him invaluable material (though she wrote so fast that she would occasionally write the wrong word) - and an enduring cheerfulness combined to carry him through. Indeed, after completion, he declared: "I adored the whole process, every minute of it."

He found Oxford University Press to be splendidly supportive publishers, although in the later years, as the climate for all British publishers grew colder and more commercial, the relaxed ease of the early relationship faded a little. His was surely one of the very last great dictionary projects not electronically compiled. Soon after his retirement the pace was stepped up as the Supplement was electronically incorporated into the original main work, to create the 20 volume Second Edition of the incomparable Dictionary.

Burchfield's growing reputation as successive volumes appeared brought him other tasks. He was asked to survey the English spoken on the BBC, and the fruits of this, The Spoken Word, published in 1981, was long used as a guide for broadcasters. He also published a brief survey of the history of the language, The English Language (1985).

He was required to travel widely and lecture internationally - fortunately he was a good man on a platform or at a party. He was president of the English Association, and became an honorary foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an honorary fellow of the Institute of Linguists, and an honorary DLitt of Liverpool University and of his old New Zealand University. He was appointed CBE in 1975.

After retirement from Oxford University Press in 1988 Burchfield became an emeritus Fellow of St Peter's College in 1990. He was by now seen as a spokesman for the English language, with press and radio turning to him for comment on new or disputed usages. A cheerful and unpompous scholar, Burchfield dealt effectively with both heavy-handed and light-hearted inquiries in these fields.

He also published, in 1989, Unlocking the English Language, and then turned to another large labour - this time for Cambridge University Press, which more realistically gave him until 1995 to complete the rewriting and updating of H. W. Fowler's quirky and celebrated Modern English Usage, published in 1926.

Robert Burchfield was married twice; first, in 1949, to Ethel May Yates. There were two daughters and a son from this marriage which was dissolved in 1976. He married, in 1976, Elizabeth Knight, also a New Zealander, who was for many years the able head of publicity for the press's academic division.

Robert Burchfield, CBE, scholar and lexicographer, was born on January 27, 1923. He died on July 5, 2004, aged 81.

This text is licensed for one month from The Times, and may not be reproduced.

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Obituary published in The Independent, Obituaries, 9 July 2004

Robert Burchfield

Workaholic Chief Editor of the Oxford English Dictionaries Robert Burchfield was the last link with the last of the four editors of The Oxford English Dictionary, C. T. Onions of Magdalen College, Oxford, the college to which Burchfield went from New Zealand in 1949 as a Rhodes Scholar. That connection shaped his life, more than he knew when he arrived.

Burchfield's parentage was solidly working-class; he was born at Wanganui, on the west coast of the North Island, and went, not to its famous public school, "the Eton of the Southern Hemisphere", but to Wanganui Technical College: he was proud of that, and the city was proud of him, and gave him the Freedom of the City in 1986.

He went on to the English Department of Victoria University College, Wellington, in the first half of the 20th century the Alma Mater of many who, having gained Rhodes or Commonwealth Scholarships, went on to Britain and distinguished themselves as medievalists and linguists, or as Renaissance scholars. He was at Victoria College from 1940 to 1941, then served in the Royal New Zealand Artillery including two years in Italy, and returned to the college in 1946-48. He taught there in the year that followed his graduation: it coincided with the 50th anniversary of its foundation, and he wrote for that occasion the rarest of his publications, a brief history of the college.

When he turned up in Oxford in October 1949, properly clad in a graduate's gown, to attend Professor C. L. Wrenn's lecture series on Beowulf he seemed to his undergraduate contemporaries a formidable figure. Rhodes Scholars took a second BA in Oxford, after only two years. Magdalen knew him as a good rugby player, soon to become the captain of the Magdalen team, and his tenure of that captaincy showed his character, for he gave it up at the end of his first year because it deflected him from his work, was summoned by the Warden of Rhodes House, Sir Carleton Allen, and told that his duty lay as much on the playing-field as in the library: Burchfield did not give in.

Onions was the Fellow Librarian of his college, a daily, intimidating presence, Reader in English Philology. As such, he did not teach undergraduates, but he somehow took to Burchfield, and Burchfield learnt a lot from him informally. Formally Jack Bennett and C. S. Lewis were his tutors, and he went to Gabriel Turville-Petre for Old Icelandic. He gladly absorbed scholarship. Of those who were his contemporaries in the philologically oriented English Course I - for them there was no literature after the death of Chaucer in 1400 - no one's lecture-notes were as neatly written and as well organised as his, no one's mind was as clear as his.

Burchfield's last two years as a Rhodes Scholar were spent as a graduate student supervised by J. R. R. Tolkien on an edition of The Ormulum, a late-12th-century text the language of which requires knowledge of the early Scandinavian languages as well as, of course, Old and Middle English. Tolkien had the necessary erudition, and was an inspiring supervisor. (Indeed Burchfield chose "Tollers" as his hero for The Independent Magazine's series "Heroes and Villains" in 1989.) Burchfield's edition, however, was never completed. Sadly, when I last saw him in hospital, very ill with Parkinson's disease and no longer thinking clearly, he said, did I know, in another fortnight he would be handing in to the publishers the completed edition?

Bob Burchfield came over from Wellington newly married, to Ethel née Yates, a marriage dissolved in 1976, and from April 1950 their children were born. He needed money after the Rhodes, and during Bennett's year of study leave Magdalen appointed him as a Junior Lecturer, and then Christ Church appointed him as Lecturer from 1953 to 1957.

The growing family inhabited a college house near the railway station, and on the river, too dangerous it seemed to Ethel, who was anxious for the safety of their children, two girls and a boy. Bob may well not have noticed: he was so busy with teaching at Christ Church and at St Peter's, the college to which he was attached as Tutorial Fellow, and then Emeritus Fellow to the end of his life; as Honorary Secretary of the Early English Text Society, 1955-68; and briefly as editor with J. C. Maxwell of Notes and Queries. He was a workaholic, and he needed to be, seeing the low pay of academic jobs.

In 1957 Burchfield was appointed by the Oxford University Press to produce a supplement to The Oxford English Dictionary. The main purpose, as seen by the press, was to bring up to date that great work of reference that had become increasingly out of date; new words and new uses were to be authoritatively recorded. He knew that the whole of OED, Old, Middle, and Modern English, was in need of revision, yet all he was supposed to do was to add more recent information than was in OED. Readers of journals and books had to be commissioned to provide quotations, and when Burchfield nearly despaired of finding them many of his friends and colleagues, and their spouses, turned to, and wrote out slips with quotations.

As time went on the little house in Jericho, at the side of the press, was too small for so great an endeavour, and it was accommodated more spaciously in the house on St Giles, latterly occupied by the revisers of The Dictionary of National Biography. In 1971 the press appointed him Chief Editor of the Oxford English Dictionaries, and in 1972 the first of four huge volumes of his A Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary appeared, the last in 1984.

Honours came to him from 1972 onwards. He was appointed CBE in 1975, Liverpool University gave him an Hon DLitt, as did in 1983 Victoria University of Wellington; he was President of the English Association, 1978-79, a foundation in Hamburg honoured him with the Shakespeare Prize in 1994. Wholly unpompous and not one bit status-conscious he enjoyed being honoured, and he was pleased that Terry F. Hoad and I edited a Festschrift for him (Words: for Robert Burchfield's sixty-fifth birthday, 1988). The happiest event was his marriage in 1976 to Elizabeth Knight, also a New Zealander, and at that time on the staff of the OUP at Ely House, London.

In Who's Who? Burchfield gives as the first of his recreations "investigating English grammar". If "grammar" includes lexicography and the history of the language, that supposed "recreation" defines his life succinctly; it indicates that work is his recreation. He helped Tolkien finish his edition of Ancrene Wisse in 1962, he helped Onions finish The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology in 1966.

Among his publications, he produced in 1986 The New Zealand Pocket Oxford Dictionary, he edited Studies in Lexicography in 1987, and the volume of The Cambridge History of the English Language on English in Britain and overseas in 1994. And for the forthcoming third edition of The Oxford English Dictionary he strove to revise entries that have quotations from The Ormulum.

His last book, for the OUP (like almost all his work), is The New Fowler's Modern English Usage (1996). It shows his total grasp of the subject. The writing of it, though laborious, gave him pleasure, as did the many favourable reviews. Of course, he had prejudices, yet, unlike H. W. Fowler (the title of whose book he took over, though little else), he was permissive rather than prescriptive, and his entry prescriptivism in The New Fowler is not merely a model of clarity and of historical accuracy: it shows how he exercised his scholarly judgement. He was a practical man, not a theoretician of language.

He liked to quote what Dr Onions had said to him: "Lexicography can be done on the kitchen table."

Eric Stanley

Robert William Burchfield, lexicographer and philologist: born Wanganui, New Zealand 27 January 1923; Junior Lecturer in English Language, Magdalen College, Oxford 1952-53; Lecturer in English Language, Christ Church, Oxford 1953-57; Honorary Secretary, Early English Text Society 1955-68; Editor, A Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary 1957-86; Lecturer, St Peter's College, Oxford 1955-63, Tutorial Fellow 1963-79, Senior Research Fellow 1979-90, Emeritus Fellow 1990-2004; Editor, Notes and Queries 1959-62; Chief Editor, Oxford English Dictionaries 1971-84; CBE 1975; President, English Association 1978-79; married 1949 Ethel Yates (one son, two daughters; marriage dissolved 1976), 1976 Elizabeth Knight; died Abingdon, Oxfordshire 5 July 2004.

Reproduced by permission from The Independent, Obituaries, 9 July 2004.

by E. Goodman Boston Globe Monday, July 19, 2004 BOSTON - Over decades of driving, my cars have been called many things. Slovenly, for one. Decrepit, for another. The single adjective that has never been used to describe a car of mine is "hip." Trust me on this. As a confessed car slob, my sole interest in the motor is that when I turn it on, it will go. Every 10 years or so, when I reluctantly enter a salesroom, I am more interested in cup holders and seat warmers than in anything remotely motor trendy. Then, a few months ago, we bought a hybrid. This car has a name - Prius - so unracy that it sounds vaguely like a pill for erectile dysfunction. But it not only has two cup holders and optional seat warmers, it has a gas engine, an electric motor and a dashboard screen that tells me exactly how many miles per gallon I am getting every single obsessive second that I have my eyes on the screen instead of the road. It also has this nifty, if unsettling, way of going absolutely dead silent at the stop light as if I just stalled out. And, of course, it gets close to 60 miles to the gallon. Now, for the first time, a car of ours has been accused of being "hip." And I do mean accused. We hybrid owners - a mere 50,000 in a sea of 17 million cars sold last year - are being typecast as granola-crunching, tree-hugging enviro-snobs. Not only did a New York Times writer sneeringly call our vehicles "hip," another mocked us as "virtuous." A third suggested that we were driving with moral superiority, "the automotive equivalent of corrective shoes." Since Susan Sarandon eschewed the limo to pull up to the Oscars in her Prius, we've been tarnished with the Hollywood glitter. One professor even declared that driving a hybrid was a way of saying, "I'm more intelligent than the next guy." Oh, how I wish I could tell you that we sprung for the Prius because we knew the price of gas was on its way over the $2 mark. Or that we're so thrifty we're putting the roughly $300 a year in saved gas money in our grandchildren's education fund. But the truth is, blush, that the road trip had become a guilt trip. Every time I pulled up to a gas station in the wake of Sept. 11, I started thinking about America's Middle Eastern "friends" and the madrassa schools they support with my gas-guzzling dollars. Then too, there was global warming, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the fact of Americans using 10 times more gas than the global norm, the bright pink Victoria's Secret Hummer parked outside my office, and you get the idea. If the car is to the environment as the cigarette is to the body, if I'm not about to go cold turkey - or cold bike - why not go hybrid? A New Yorker cartoon said all we needed to know about the technology: "It runs on its conventional gasoline-powered engine until it senses guilt, at which point it switches over to battery power." Anyway, I am more than happy to take a little mockery along with my mileage. But the image makeover from car slob to car snob is part of the weird process these days by which anyone who thinks about doing any good becomes a do-gooder, which is baaaad. Doing the right thing is tagged as the left thing, which is the wrong thing. It all began when folks sensitized to race or gender issues were politically corrected for being "politically correct." Now everything you say, do, or drive gets politicized, polarized, and stereotyped. If you follow the religious line of moral values you get inscribed in the Bill Bennett "Book of Virtues." If you follow the line of environmental values, you get mocked as "virtuous." If you eat cheeseburgers, you're one of the guys. If you buy organic greens, you're looking down on one of the guys. This time, the image remakers may be on the wrong side of the highway, since hybrids are wait-listed and Hummers are discounted. Arnold Schwarzenegger himself has talked of turning one of his Hummers green - though a hybrid Hummer is a little like a low-carb Krispy Kreme donut. But I am sure there's a conventional automaker somewhere with a book called: "Real Men Don't Drive Hybrids." What does a "hip," "virtuous," "smarter-than-thou" driver do to fight back? We could have every hybrid sold with a Nascar sticker on the bumper. Or with a side order of steroids. We could change the name from Prius to Pitbull. Or maybe, as good little hipsters, we can just laugh quietly all the way - I mean aaalllllll the way - to the gas pump. ---------- Ellen Goodman's column appears regularly in The Boston Globe.

Mr. Menardo “Butch” Jimenez UP Diliman Commencement Speech April 27, 2003 As graduates, you are just about to set sail into the real world. As you prepare for the battleground of life, you will hear many speeches, read tons of books, and get miles of advice telling you to work hard, dream big, go out and do something for yourself, and have a vision. Not bad advice, really. In fact, following those nuggets of truth may just bring you to the top. But over the years, I have come to realize that it is great to dream big, have a vision, make a name, and work hard. But, guess what, THERE’S SOMETHING BETTER THAN THAT. So my message today simply asks the question, What’s better than…? Let us start off with something real simple. What’s better than a long speech? No doubt, a short one. So, you guys are in luck because I do intend to keep this short. Now, let me take you through a very simple math exam. I will rattle off a couple of equations, and you tell me what you observe about them. Be mindful of the instructions. You are to tell me what you OBSERVE about the equations. Here goes: 3+4=7, 9+2=11, 8+4=13, and 6+6=12. Tell me, what do you observe. Every time I conduct this test, more than 90 percent of the participants immediately say 8+4 is not 13 it is 12! That is true and they are correct. But they could have also observed that the 3 other equations are right. That 3+4 is 7, that 9+2 is 11, and that 6+6 is 12. What is my point? Many people immediately focus on the negative instead of the positive. Most of us focus on what is wrong with people more than what is right about them. Examine those 4 equations. 3 are right and only one is wrong. But what is the knee jerk observation? The wrong equation. If people you did not know were to walk through that door, most of you would describe these people by what is negative about them. He’s fat. He’s balding. Oh, the short one. Oh the skinny girl. Ahhh, yung pango. Etc, etc, etc. Get the point? You will definitely experience this in the corporate world. You do a hundred good things and make one mistake. Guess what, chances are, your attention will be called on that one mistake. So what is better than focusing on the negative? Believe me, it is focusing on the positive more than the negative. You do that, and this world would be a much nicer place to live in. What’s Better than Working Hard? We have always been told to work hard. Our parents say that, our teachers say that, and our principal says that. But there is something better than merely working hard. It is working smart. It is taking time to understand the situation, and coming out with an effective and efficient solution to get more done with less time and effort. As the Japanese say, “There’s always a better way.” What’s Better than Dreaming Big I will bet my next month’s salary that many have encouraged you to DREAM BIG. Maybe even to reach for the stars and aim high. I sure heard that about a million times right before I graduated from this university. So I did. I did dream big. I did aim high. I did reach for the stars. There is no doubt it works. In fact, the saying is true: “If you aim for nothing, that is exactly what you will hit…nothing.” But there’s something better than dreaming big. Believe me, I was shocked myself. And I learned it from the biggest dreamer of all time, Walt Disney. When it comes to dreaming big, Walt is the man. No bigger dreams were fulfilled than his. Every leadership book describes him as the ultimate dreamer. In fact, the principle of dreaming and achieving is the core message of the Disney hit song, “When You Wish Upon A Star.” “When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are; anything your heart desires will come to you. If your heart is in your dream, no request is too extreme. When you wish upon a star, as dreamers do.” – Jiminy Cricket. But is that what he preached in the Disney Company? Dream? Well, not exactly. Kinda, but not quite. The problem with dreaming is if that is all you do, you get nowhere. In fact you may just fall asleep and never wake up. The secret to Disney’s success is not just dreaming, it is IMAGINEERING. You will not find this word in a dictionary. It is purely Disney word. Those that engage in imagineering are called imagineers. The word combines the word imagination with engineering. In the book, “Imagineers”, Disney’s CEO, Michael Eisner claims that “Imagineers turn impossible dreams into real magic.” Walt Disney explains that there is really no secret to their approach. They just keep moving forward, opening new doors and doing new things, because they are curious. And it is this curiosity that leads them down new paths. They always dream, explore, and experiment. In short, IMAGINEERING is the blending of creative imagination and technical know-how. Eisner expounds on this thought by saying that “not only are imagineers curious, they are courageous, outrageous, and their creativity is contagious.” The difference with imagineers is that they dream and then they DO! So do not just be a dreamer, be an imagineer. What’s Better than a Vision? You must all have been given a lecture at one time or another about the importance of having a vision. Even leadership expert, John Maxwell, says that an indispensable quality of a leader is to have a vision. The Bible also makes it very clear: “Without vision, people perish.” So, no doubt about it, having a vision is important to success. But surprise! There’s something more potent that a vision… it is a CAUSE. If all you are doing is trying to reach your vision and you are pitted against someone fighting for a cause, chances are you will lose. The Vietnam War is a classic example. Literally with sticks and stones, the Viet Cong beat the heavily armed US Army, primarily because the US had a vision to win the war but the Vietnamese were fighting for a cause. Jesus had a rag tag “army” of 12 disciples against the pagan gods of the mighty Roman Empire. But they were able to turn the world around towards Christianity. How? They just did not have a vision to spread their faith; they were truly fighting for a cause. In the realm of business, Sony founder Akio Morita did not just have a vision to build the biggest electronics company in the world. Read his biography, “Made in Japan.” He was fighting for a cause, and his cause was to help rebuild his country battered by a war. His vision to be an electronics giant was secondary. So what’s the difference between a vision and a cause? The following Vision Cause No one is willing to die for a vision People will die for a cause You posses a vision A cause possesses you A vision lies in your hands A cause lies in your heart A vision involves sacrifice A cause involves the ultimate sacrifice A Final Review • What’s better than focusing on the negative? Focus on the positive. • What’s better than working hard? It is working smart. • What’s better than dreaming? Imagineering. • What’s better than a vision? A cause. • What’s better than a long speech? Definitely, a short one. 2 final points: - “To whom much is given, much is required.” - “There is no destination beyond the reach of one who talks with God.”

The unedited article below was written below by an American friend, Barth Suretsky. This will still be edited but you will get the gist. I find his observations interesting. I hope this will make an impact on the Filipinos who read this article as I greatly lament the worsening situation of our country. - Frank Woolf ----------------------- My decision to move to Manila was not a precipitous one. I used to work in New York as an outside agent for PAL, and have been coming to the Philippines since August, 1982. I was so impressed with the country, and with the interesting people I met, some of which have become very close friends to this day, that I asked for and was granted a year's sabbatical from my teaching job in order to live in the Philippines. I arrived here on August 21, 1983, several hours after Ninoy Aquino was shot, and remained here until June of 1984. During that year I visited many parts of the country, from as far north as Laoag to as far south as Zamboanga, and including Palawan. I became deeply immersed in the history and culture of the archipelago, and an avid collector of tribal antiquities from both northern Luzon, and Mindanao. In subsequent years I visited the Philippines in 1985, 1987, and 1991, before deciding to move here permanently in 1998. I love this country, but not uncritically, and that is the purpose of this article. First, however, I will say that I would not consider living anywhere else in Asia, no matter how attractive certain aspects of other neighboring countries may be. To begin with, and this is most important, with all its faults, the Philippines is still a democracy, more so than any other nation in Southeast Asia. Despite gross corruption, the legal system generally works, and if ever confronted with having to employ it, I would feel much more safe trusting the courts here than in any other place in the surrounding area. The press here is unquestionably the most unfettered and freewheeling in Asia, and I do not believe that is hyperbole in any way! And if any one thing can be used as a yardstick to measure the extent of the democratic process in any given country in the world, it is the extent to which the press is free. But the Philippines is a flawed democracy nevertheless, and the flaws are deeply rooted in the Philippine psyche. I will elaborate... The basic problem seems to me, after many years of observation, to be a national inferiority complex, a disturbing lack of pride in being Filipino. Toward the end of April I spent eight days in Vietnam, visiting Hanoi, Hue, and Ho Chi Minh City. I am certainly no expert on Vietnam, but what I saw could not be denied: I saw a country ravaged as no other country has been in this century by thirty years of continuous and incredibly barbaric warfare. When the Vietnam War ended in April, 1975, the country was totally devastated. Yet in the past twenty-five years the nation has healed and rebuilt itself almost miraculously! The countryside has been replanted and reforested. Hanoi and HCMC have been beautifully restored. The opera house in Hanoi is a splended restoration of the original, modeled after the Opera in Paris, and the gorgeous Second Empire theater, on the main square of HCMC is as it was when built by the French a century ago. The streets are tree-lined, clean, and conducive for strolling. Cafes in the French style proliferate on the wide boulevards of HCMC. I am not praising the government of Vietnam, which still has a long way to travel on the road to democracy, but I do praise, and praise unstintingly, the pride of the Vietnamese people. It is due to this pride in being Vietnamese that has enabled its citizenry to undertake the miracle of restoration that I have described above. When I returned to Manila I became so depressed that I was actually physically ill for days thereafter. Why? Well, let's go back to a period when the Philippines resembled the Vietnam of 1975. It was 1945, the end of World War II, and Manila, as well as many other cities, lay in ruins... (As a matter of fact, it may not be generally known, but Manila was the second most destroyed city in the entire war; only Warsaw was more demolished!) But to compare Manila in 1970, twenty-five years after the end of the war, with HCMC, twenty-five years after the end of its war, is a sad exercise indeed. Far from restoring the city to its former glory, by 1970 Manila was well on its way to being the most tawdry city in Southeast Asia. And since that time the situation has deteriorated alarmingly. We have a city full of street people, beggars, and squatters. We have a city that floods sections whenever there is a rainstorm, and that loses electricity with every clap of thunder. We have a city full of potholes, and on these unrepaired roads we have a traffic situation second to none in the world for sheer unmanageability. We have rude drivers, taxis that routinely refuse to take passengers because of "many trappic!" The roads are also cursed with pollution-spewing buses in disreputable states of repair, and that ultimate anachronism, the jeepney! We have an educational system that allows children to attend schools without desks or books to accomodate them. Teachers, even college professors, are paid salaries so disgracefully low that it's a wonder that anyone would want to go into the teaching profession in the first place. We have a war in Mindanao that nobody seems to have a clue how to settle. The only policy to deal with the war seems to be to react to what happens daily, with no long range plan whatever. I could go on and on, but it is an endeavor so filled with futility that it hurts me to go on. It hurts me because, in spite of everything, I love the Philippines. Maybe it will sound simplistic, but to go back to what I said above, it is my unshakable belief that the fundamental thing wrong with this country is a lack of pride in being Filipino. A friend once remarked to me, laconically: "All Filipinos want to be something else. The poor ones want to be American, and the rich ones all want to be Spaniards. Nobody wants to be Filipino." That statement would appear to be a rather simplistic one, and perhaps it is. However, I know one Filipino who refuses to enter a theater until the national anthem has stopped being played because he doesn't want to honor his own country, and I know another one who thinks that history stopped dead in 1898 when the Spaniards departed! While it is certainly true that these represent extreme examples of national denial, the truth is not a pretty picture. Filipinos tend to worship, almost slavishly, everything foreign. If it comes from Italy or France it has to be better than anything made here. If the idea is American or German it has to be superior to anything that Filipinos can think up for themselves. Foreigners are looked up to and idolized. Foreigners can go anywhere without question. In my own personal experience I remember attending recently an affair at a major museum here. I had forgotten to bring my invitation. But while Filipinos entering the museum were checked for invitations, I was simply waived through. This sort of thing happens so often here that it just accepted routine. All of these things, the illogical respect given to foreigners simply because they are not Filipinos, the distrust and even disrespect shown to any homegrown merchandise, the neglect of anything Philippine, the rudeness of taxi drivers, the ill-manners shown by many Filipinos are all symptomatic of a lack of self-love, of respect for and love of the country in which they were born, and worst of all, a static mind-set in regard to finding ways to improve the situation. Most Filipinos, when confronted with evidence of governmental corruption, political chicanery, or gross exploitation on the part of the business community, simply shrug their shoulders, mutter "bahala na," and let it go at that. It is an oversimplification to say this, but it is not without a grain of truth to say that Filipinos feel downtrodden because they allow themselves to feel downtrodden. No pride. One of the most egregious examples of this lack of pride, this uncaring attitude to their own past or past culture, is the wretched state of surviving architectural landmarks in Manila and elsewhere. During the American period many beautiful and imposing buildings were built, in what we now call the "art deco" style (although, incidentally, that was not a contemporary term; it was coined only in the 1960s). These were beautiful edifices, mostly erected during, or just before, the Commonwealth period. Three, which are still standing, are the Jai Alai Building, the Metropolitan Theater, and the Rizal Stadium. Fortunately, due to the truly noble efforts of my friend John Silva, the Jai Alai Building will now be saved. But unless something is done to the most beautiful and original of these three masterpieces of pre-war Philippine architecture, the Metropolitan Theater, it will disintegrate. The Rizal Stadium is in equally wretched shape. When the wreckers' ball destroyed Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, and New York City's most magnificent building, Pennsylvania Station, both in 1963, Ada Louise Huxtable, then the architectural critic of The New York Times, wrote: "A disposable culture loses the right to call itself a civilization at all!" How right she was! (Fortunately, the destruction of Pennsylvania Station proved to be the sacrificial catalyst that resulted in the creation of New York's Landmark Commission. Would that such a commission be created for Manila...) Are there historical reasons for this lack of national pride? We can say that until the arrival of the Spaniards there was no sense of a unified archipelago constituted as one country. True. We can also say that the high cultures of other nations in the region seemed, unfortunately, to have bypassed the Philippines; there are no Angkors, no Ayuttayas, no Borobudurs. True. Centuries of contact with the "high cultures" of the Khmers and the Chinese had, except for the proliferation of Song dynasty pottery found throughout the archipelago, no noticeable effect. True. But all that aside, what was here? To begin with, the ancient rice terraces, now threatened with disintegration, incidentally, was an incredible feat of engineering for so-called "primitive" people. As a matter of fact, when I first saw them in 1984, I was almost as awe-stricken as I was when I first laid eyes on the astonishing Inca city of Machu Picchu, high in the Peruvian Andes. The degree of artistry exhibited by the various tribes of the Cordillera of Luzon is testimony to a remarkable culture, second to none in the Southeast Asian region. As for Mindanao, at the other end of the archipelago, an equally high degree of artistry has been manifest for centuries in woodcarving, weaving and metalwork. However, the most shocking aspect of this lack of national pride, even identity, endemic in the average Filipino, is the appalling ignorance of the history of the archipelago since unified by Spain and named Filipinas. The remarkable stories concerning the Galleon de Manila, the courageous repulsion of Dutch and British invaders from the 16th through the 18th centuries, even the origins of the independence movement of the late 19th century, are hardly known by the average Filipino in any meaningful way. And thanks to fifty years of American brainwashing, it is few and far between the number of Filipinos who really know - or even care - about the duplicity employed by the Americans and Spaniards to sell out and make meaningless the very independent state that Aguinaldo declared on June 12, 1898. A people without a sense of history is a people doomed to be unaware of their own identity. It is sad to say, but true, that the vast majority of Filipinos fall into this lamentable category. Without a sense of who you are, how can you possibly take any pride in who you are? These are not oversimplifications. On the contrary, these are the root problems of the Philippine inferiority complex referred to above. Until the Filipino takes pride in being Filipino these ills of the soul will never be cured. If what I have written here can help, even in the smallest way, to make the Filipino aware of just who he is, who he was, and who he can be, I will be one happy expat indeed! # posted by Nate : 1:11 AM (Retrieved from the Information Ukay-Ukay)

Tilting at Windbags: A Crusade Against Rank By JULIE SALAMON NYT July 10, 2004 Western society has denounced racism, sexism and anti-Semitism, mobilized against ageism and genderism, anguished over postcolonialism and nihilism, taken arms against Marxism, totalitarianism and absolutism, and trashed, at various conferences and cocktail parties, liberalism and conservatism. Is it possible there is yet another ism to mobilize against? Robert W. Fuller, a boyishly earnest 67-year-old who has spent most of his life in academia, thinks so, and he calls it "rankism," the bullying behavior of people who think they are superior. The manifesto? Nobodies of the world unite! - against mean bosses, disdainful doctors, power-hungry politicians, belittling soccer coaches and arrogant professors. "I wanted a nasty word for the crime, an unpleasant word, a stinky word," he said, referring to his choice of the word rankism. "Language is incredibly important in making political change. I always go back to that word sexism and how it became the catalyst for a movement." Mr. Fuller wants nothing less than moral as well as behavioral accountability from the people in charge, whether of governments, companies, patients, employees or students. And he pitches his quixotic notion in a book, a Web site (breakingranks.net), in radio interviews and in lectures at universities and business gatherings that could be considered breeding farms for somebodies. "The theory has the potential to explain many things we just ignore as a given," said Camilo Azcarate, Princeton University's ombudsman, who recently attended one of Mr. Fuller's lectures and bought several copies of his book to give to friends. Democracy and education should concentrate on creating virtuous citizens. This is exactly the kind of discussion we need to have." Mr. Fuller began postulating these theories on the Internet several years ago, and then brought them together last year in a book called "Somebodies and Nobodies" (New Society Publishers), published recently in paperback. He can't answer how, exactly, his lofty ideas might translate into political or legal action. "I don't see the form the movement will take," he confessed in an interview at his home in Berkeley. "But I don't feel too bad about it because Betty Friedan told me she didn't have any idea there would be a women's movement when she wrote `The Feminine Mystique.' You need five years of consciousness-raising before you find the handle." Ms. Friedan provided a blurb for his book. Other supporting blurbers include Bill Moyers, the political scientist Frances Fukuyama and the author Studs Terkel. So far the book has sold 33,000 copies (including bulk sales); and his Web site totals 2,000 to 3,000 visitors a week, his Web master, Melanie Hart, said. Mr. Fuller's appeal nonetheless eludes some critics. In one of the few reviews of "Somebodies and Nobodies," Clay Evans, books editor of The Daily Camera newspaper in Boulder, Colo., was dismissive. Mr. Fuller's concepts, he wrote, "were old when Jesus was making fishers of men." But with others, he has struck a chord. Among the 2,000 people who had downloaded a working manuscript of his were Mary Lou and Ann Richardson, two sisters living in Roanoke, Va. They were so inspired by that early version that they eventually met with Mr. Fuller after the book was published. The women, Ann Richardson said, had been taking care of an aging mother with Parkinson's disease and were distressed by how people's treatment of her changed after she lost her ability to speak. They were not happy with the way their siblings responded either. "I couldn't believe that people who loved me could harm me because of the perceived rank they had in the family," said Ann Richardson, 46, who used to work as a customer services manager for a graphic arts company in Washington, and is now studying film and photography at Hollins University in Roanoke. The sisters began their own Dignitarian Foundation, described on its Web site (dignitarians.org) as "an organization dedicated to promoting and protecting the intrinsic right to human dignity." Ann Richardson said her motive was simple: "If I can help some people start believing in themselves, it would make the world a much better, more peaceful place." This was not the role Mr. Fuller seemed destined to fulfill. Designated a math and science whiz kid, he entered Oberlin College at age 15, expecting to follow the path of his father, Calvin S. Fuller, a physicist at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey who was co-inventor of the solar cell. After Oberlin, Mr. Fuller accumulated credentials with breathtaking speed. By 18 he was enrolled in graduate school at Princeton. At 33 he was named president of Oberlin. In between he learned about politics at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and economics at the University of Chicago, helped write a significant physics text ("Mathematics of Classical and Quantum Physics" (Addison Wesley Publishing Company), taught at Columbia University, did a fellowship at Wesleyan University and was dean of faculty at Trinity College in Hartford. His peripatetic intellectual ambitions coincided with an era of social upheaval. Mr. Fuller left for Oberlin as an undergraduate in 1952, thinking Dwight D. Eisenhower was the perfect next president. By the time he returned to Oberlin as its president in 1970, he was ready to lead the college through the revolutions of the period - making changes in admissions policies for African-American students, abolishing course requirements, ending parietal hours. Then, after 22 years on the academic fast track, he quit - at age 37. He left Oberlin and his first wife, with whom he had had two children, and traveled around the world for three months. Then he settled in Berkeley where, he said, "I sat still for two years, read 200 books and completely re-educated myself." Among other things, he began to realize his role model may have been his mother, Willmine Works Fuller. "She wasn't very concerned about social justice, but if someone tried to step on her toes, watch out," Mr. Fuller said, recalling a protest his mother organized against putting an airport near his hometown of Chatham, N.J. "She could not stand to be pushed around by those in authority or bullies." Nor was she particularly touchy-feely: she once kept her son confined to his room for 48 hours because he refused to eat his spinach. He became obsessed with the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. "The bomb makes nobodies of all of us, that's how I put it now," he said. With a new wife, and eventually two more children in tow (a third wife would come still later) he began traveling through the Soviet Union, paying for the expeditions by giving speeches and raising money from philanthropists. Calling himself a citizen diplomat, he helped arrange televised discussions between Soviet and American scientists via satellite links. "He believes it's possible to work through the cracks of the monolith," said Kim Spencer, formerly a producer for ABC News and now president of Link TV, a satellite network that features documentaries from around the world. Mr. Spencer worked with Mr. Fuller on the Soviet programs and remains a friend. "When I was putting together a TV network I had to go out for a walk with Bob to see the bigger thing," he added. In 1987, Mr. Fuller found a crucial advocate for his expensive self-discovery - Robert Cabot, a novelist and diplomat, but also heir to a family fortune. They traveled together to the Soviet Union, Afghanistan and China and together wrote a few articles. Mr. Cabot put money into some of Mr. Fuller's citizen-diplomacy projects, which always struggled for financing. One day Mr. Cabot decided to become Mr. Fuller's patron. For 15 years he paid him to think - and to travel, expenses paid. No rankism there: Mr. Cabot included pension payments, which kicked in two years ago when Mr. Fuller turned 65. How does Mr. Cabot feel about the way his money has been spent? "I am immensely gratified," he said. "I think we are witnessing an extreme abuse of rankism in Washington, D.C., right now. Our policy in the Middle East is rankism." Mr. Fuller acknowledges that rankism is harder to pin down than other more apparent forms of discrimination - sex, race and disability. "We try to sniff how much power each of us has by asking: `What do you do? Where did you go to school? Who's your husband?' " said Mr. Fuller. "It's like trying to find out if someone's gay or not, if they're a threat to us or if we can get away with abusing or exploiting them." Mr. Fuller isn't calling for an end to hierarchy, but neither is he simply asking for mere politeness. Yes, national leaders should refrain from cursing at one another in public places; executives should treat subordinates with respect. But more controversially, he would get rid of faculty tenure at universities, which he calls "an outdated sacrosanct privilege of a few somebodies held at the expense of many nobodies." He urges people to remember that rank is mutable: you can be a nobody at work and a somebody at home, or vice versa. And, he points out, almost everyone eventually "gets nobodied." The tall and lanky Mr. Fuller, whose presentation can be stiff and formal, doesn't rouse his audiences with smooth patter and startling revelations of abuse he's suffered. But his reflective, old-fashioned professorial approach to his sometimes glib, populist theories has been taken in some quarters as a refreshing whiff of sincerity in a skeptical age. When he spoke at Mount Holyoke College last September, Andrea Ayvazian, dean of religious life, was surprised to see how mixed the audience was: students, faculty members, administrators, staff members and campus workers. "Bob's analysis freed people who considered themselves low in the hierarchy to tell their stories," said Dr. Ayvazian, who was a student of Mr. Fuller's 30 years earlier. "I saw this had struck a chord in unpredictable circles."