SPAN: March/April 2002

Globetrotting for Art's Sake Photographer-director Benoy Behl and researcher Latika Gupta scoured the globe to find rarely seen treasures of Indian art for the soon-to-be aired documentary series "Paintings of India. " Some exquisite examples were found in America.

Dara Shikoh at the Pari Mahal, overlooking Dal Lake in Kashmil; 17th century, paper; Stuart Cmy Welch Collection.

Krishna, wearing women S clothes, approaching Radha.

Kota, Rajasthan, late 18th century, paper; Philadelphia Museum of Art.

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hat Benoy Behl is a votary of art is clear from his delicate sensitivity in documenting the treasures ofIndian art in photographs. Noted for photographing the Ajanta Caves in low light a few years ago (see SPAN, March 1992), he has been tirelessly at work since, not only documenting but helping to preserve sites. And he has a knack of finding priceless art in out-ofthe-way places, from remote Kinnauri monasteries to forgotten caves near Amritsar.

For his most recent project, a series of26 video documentaries on Indian art for Doordarshan, he traversed the globe seeking masterpieces-some of them in the United States. "American museums and collectors were quite generous with their help," he said recently dming a break in editing the documentary, which is scheduled to air in April. Some artworks turned up in unexpected places, such as the Free Library of Philadelphia. It was a huge project covering the continuous development of Indian art: "We identified 800 to 1,000 masterpieces to be covered. We ended up with over 2,000."

The more the better. Behl revels in the plentitude of art in India, where, he says, "there is a very clear and philosophical understanding of why there should be art. And what art should do is given a very important place."

Aesthetics is a well defined component of Indian philosophy. The reason, he says, is "the aesthetic experiencewhen you see that beautiful sunrise, you see a beautiful work of 31i, it is with the understanding of the harmony of life.

That experience where you feel as if you come out of yourself, that ecstasy,

SPAN Publisher James Callahan

As Good As Gold?

Editor-in-Chief Angela Aggeler

By T.J. Stiles

Editor Lea Terhune

God and Business

By Marc Gunther

Associate Editor A. Venkata Narayana

PANDAmonium at the Smithsonian Zoo

Copy Editor Dipesh K. Satapathy

By Leslie Allen Editorial Assistant K. Muthukumar Art Director Suhas Nimbalkar

Lions and Tigers and Bears,

Deputy Art Director Hemant Bhatnagar

路Oh My!

Production/Circulation Manager Rakesh Agrawal

By Lea Terhune

Research Services AIRC Documentation Services, American Information Resource Center Front cover: Tian Tian at the Fujifilm Giant Panda Conservation Habitat at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park, Washington, D.C. He was born in 1997 at the China Research and Conservation Center, Wolong, Sichuan Province. Photograph by Jessie Cohen, Smithsonian National Zoo. See story on page 18.

On the Lighter Side Why We Travel ByPicolyer

STATEMENT FORM IV The following is a statement of ownership and other particulars about SPAN magazine as required under Section 19D(b) of the Press and Registration of Books Act, 1867, and under Rule 8 of the Registration of Newspaper (Central) Rules, 1956.

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Andy Grove's Rational Exuberance An Interview by John Heilemann

Is This a Religious War?

By Andrew SuUivan

Students of the Game

By Steve Kemper

Frank Stella as Architect

By Franz Schulze

Lincoln's Laughter

J, James J. Callahan, hereby declare that the particulars are true to the best of my knowledge and belief.

given above

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Visit SPAN on the Web at usembassy.state.gov/posts/in1/wwwh19.html U.S. Embassy Homepage usembassy.state.gov/posts/in1/wwwhmain.html

By B.G. Tandon

Consular Focus

By Nyda Budig

A LETTER

S

FROM

pring is upon us, as good a tin1e as any for "PANDAmonium," our cover story by Leslie Allen. Allen tracks the lives of the Smithsonian National Zoo's two young pandas, who just completed their first year in residence. Research about such endangered animals in the zoo and the field may help save species in the years to conle. A smaller zoo on the other side of the U.S. is the subject of Lea Terhune's "Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!" Com-pact size is not necessarily a disadvantage when it comes to good zoo keeping.

A different kind of animal is the corporate executive. "God and Business," by Marc Gunther, investigates a new trend in business: bringing spirituality into the workplace. And it's not driven by churches, it is powered "by business people who yearn to find meaning in what they do."

As business people go, Andy Grove has seen it all, riding the crest of the infotech wave from its inception. He is the head of Intel, and in this interview

by John Heilemann, "Andy Grove's Rational Exuberance," high tech's legendary skeptic gives his seasoned perspective on recent industry ups and downs, he tells why he remains an Internet bull, and how Intel intends to face the future.

The introduction of the Euro is hotly debated even as it issues from ATMs all over Europe.

In the old days, commerce required gold. Not anymore. "As Good As Gold?" by T.J. Stiles, traces the decline and fall of the gold standard as money evolved from barter to bullion to dollars to electronic ephemera-with more than one crisis along the way.

"Why We Travel" is a thoughtful and relevant excursion by author Pico Iyer into the more elevated dimensions of travel. Iyer, a selfconfessed citizen of the world "vho lives mostly

THE

PUBLISHER

in Japan, touched down in India for the recent Indian Council for Cultural Relations-sponsored writers' conference. "The sovereign freedom of traveling comes from the fact that it whirls you around and turns you upside down, and stands everything you took for granted on its head," he writes.

Andrew Sullivan gives serious thought to fundamentalism, an age-old problem that is not confined to one religion and that has resurfaced with a vengeance in the past decade. "Is This a Religious War?" asserts that we would understand the current violent conflict better "if we first acknowledged that religion is responsible in some way, and then figured out how and why."

In a lighter vein, B.G. Tandon profiles Abraham Lincoln ,vith surprising insights into that dour President's sense of humor in "Lincoln's Laughter." The multiple talents of painter Frank Stella are revealed in "Frank Stella as Architect," by Franz Schulze. And Benoy Behl, in the filming of a new documentary, has dug up some resplendent Indian treasures in U.S. art collections.

Finally, spring heralds baseball season in America. It is the time when players go to training camps and get ready for the season, soon to get underway. It's not cricket, but there is at least one similarity: the umpire. He calls the plays for well or ill, and is regularly reviled by fans. In "Students of the Game," Steve Kemper writes of his stint at an umpire training school, where the art of calling the plays is tough going.

We hope you enjoy the issue.

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t's , lyp,,,l Fcid,y foe, lyp;,,' American-and that means payday. Over her lunch hour, she makes a pilgrimage to the bank; on the screen of an automatic teller machine, she sees the reassuring numbers: her employer has deposited her wages into her checking account. She spends the rest of the hour paying her bills-settling some through the Internet, by authorizing deductions from her bank balance. Her employer has automatically subtracted her healthinsurance premium, her retirement-plan contribution and her taxes.

In a few hours she has participated in numerous transactions involving thousands of dollars, yet she has not handled one slip of physical CUITency.She organizes her entire life around this day-and she never gives a thought to the invisibility of her money. A few numbers on a computer screen, a poorly printed ATM receipt and a computerized voice on the phone are all the evidence she needs that the money is there.

So what exactly is money? It's a question that has become harder to answer, as we use less and less actual cash. Maybe one place to go for a solution is 25 meters beneath the steel and concrete forest of Manhattan's financial district, inside the international gold vault.

Maintained by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, it contains the largest hoard of monetary gold on the planet. A quarter of the world's reserves lie there, stacked floor to ceiling, bar after very heavy bar, in dozens of locked cages according to country.

Impressive as this pile may be, it suffers from a serious problem: it really isn't money anymore. Today, we cannot walk into a store, plunk down a chunk of gold and buy something. A debit card will do, but not bullion. It is not, as the economists say, a generally accepted means of payment.

And those two little words, "generally accepted," hold the secret meaning of money-and how it has melted from some of the heaviest of metals to mere electronic markers. Money is not merely a meas-

uring system for value; it is also a thing that everyone is willing to accept for payment for everything else, all the time.

But what happens when a large proportion of the public remains on the ledge, refusing to make that leap of faith? The answer is crisis-and just such a crisis dominated much of American history, shaping politics and tearing apart communities. The fight over how to define money created political paJiies, made and destroyed Presidential candidates and rang in depressions.

This long debate tells us a great deal about the nature of money, because at the center of the argument was the question of how abstract it should be. A substance intrinsically valuable, or an item we invent as needed? The issue dogged Americans for some 300 years, because we faced a critical problem: a drastic, ongoing shortage of cash.

Consider Governor Thomas Dudley of Massachusetts Bay. In 1634 he met with two ambassadors from the Pequots, the colony's powerful Native American neighbors, who came to discuss reparations for the recent murder of an Englishman by the tribe. Dudley's demands: a few dozen furs and a large cash payment-specifically, some 730 meters of wampum.

Wampum-strings of shell beadsserved an important ceremonial function among the Native American nations of the Northeast. And when the Indians began to ask for it as payment for their furs, it became almost as impOtiant to the colonists. Soon after Governor Dudley's talks with the Pequots, Massachusetts made wampum legal tender.

Wampum was not the colonists' first choice for cash. In the world they left behind, money was mostly gold and silver coin. But throughout the colonial era, the British government banned the export of coin across the Atlantic. Even when colonists began to acquire Spanish silver through trade with the West Indies, much of it went straight to England to pay for impOtis. Colonists made a few attempts to establish their own mints, but London quickly quashed them. The result was an often catastrophic shortage of money.

"We were in the Years 1721 and 1722," declared the Pennsylvania legislature, "so effectually drained of our Coin ... that the Inhabitants of every Degree were reduced to the greatest Straits; Debts could not be discharged, nor Payments be made; the Rents of Houses fell, many whereof were deserted; Artificers and Traders were obliged to quit the Country."

In desperation, the colonies began to invent money for themselves. At first, they made existing commodities the official standard. In South Carolina, rice, peas, beef and even pork were used as monetary commodities; Virginia began to set prices in terms of tobacco as early as 1619; and shortly afterward made it legal tender. The colony established warehouses where it stored bales of tobacco; it settled bills by paying out receipts for the leaf deposited there. Taxes, even salaries, were paid in these "tobacco notes," which circulated publicly and privately as a kind of paper money.

Some colonies turned to paper currency or bills of credit. Generally speaking, the issuing government would make the bills legal tender, set a terminal redemption date (usually five years or so) and establish a special tax to build a fund to payoff the notes in coin at that time.

In the Western world, legal-tender paper money (first issued by Massachusetts in 1690) was an American innovation. Despite plenty of problems, the coin-poor public loved it. In fact, one of the lesser-known provocations leading to the Revolution was an act of Parliament in 1764 that banned the issuance of paper currency in all the colonies (a ban had been issued for New England in 1751).

Many colonists saw the law in the context of the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act, the Quartering Act and the Townshend duties-which seemed to be a determined program by Parliament to suppress American autonomy.

Once the colonies organized the Second Continental Congress in 1775, Americans got more paper money than they ever wanted. Congress tried to finance the war of independence by issuing notes called continentals. It pledged

to print no more after the first batchthen proceeded to flood the economy with more than $200 million by 1780. These legal-tender bills became virtually worth~ less. In desperation, Congress turned to one of the wealthiest-and shrewdestmen in the new Republic, Robert Morris of Philadelphia.

Almost from the beginning, Morris served as the financial godfather of the Revolution. In early 1777, for example, right after George Washington won a great victory at Trenton, New Jersey, the general saw a chance to strike a second blow against the British-but many of his troops had reached the end of their terms of enlistment. Washington promised a $10 bounty to each man who stayed on for six more weeks; then he wrote a frantic appeal to Morris for the money. "I am up very early this morning to despatch a supply of $50,000 to your Excellency," Morris wrote back. The general scored another success at Princeton.

Morris accomplished a similar feat in 1781, during the critical Yorktown campaign. This time Washington was desperate for supplies. Morris mobilized his wealthy friends, pledging his personal fortune as security for purchases of flour, cattle and boats.

By the time Washington won that final victory of the war, Congress had named Morris the Superintendent of Finance.

Once again, he put his own good credit to work as he rebuilt that of the government.

At one point, he even circulated his own notes, backed by his personal wealth. His bills were considered as good as preciousmetal coin in the marketplace (thanks to Morris' vast fortune).

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ut Morris had no intention of bankrolling the new nation.

He persuaded the Continental Congress to begin construction of a financial infrastructure. In 1781 Congress established the Bank of North America-the first federally chartered bank on these shores.

It made loans to Congress, to be redeemed at specific intervals, allowing Morris to anticipate revenues and main-

tain sufficient cash flow.

After the disastrous experience with continentals, the Founders got out of the legal-tender business. They wrote a prohibition on state-issued currency into the Constitution, and Congress rested content with minting gold and silver coins. Paper money was left to banks. Usually banks would take deposits in gold and silver coin (or "specie," to use the technical term) and make loans by issuing paper notes. The public paid each other with these privately printed bills, assuming they could be redeemed at the issuing bank for precious-metal coin (or cash-as in "cold, hard cash"). Banks multiplied the supply of money: they issued paper wOtih two or three times their specie reserves, since it was unlikely all their notes would be returned at once.

All this raised the abstraction of money to bewildering propOliions.

Gold and silver coin was still there at the heart of the system, tangible and real.

But it tended to settle in the bellies of banks, which digested it and regurgitated paper notes. All kinds of notes. By 1860 there were no less than 1,562 state-charted banks, and almost everyone distributed its own variety of bills.

When that private-enterprise paper hit the marketplace, it fluctuated in value depending on how easily the notes could get "real" money (that is, specie). A merchant might insist on steeply discounting a note, when taking it as payment, because of the issuing bank's reputation. Distance mattered too: The farther away the bank, the harder to return its notes for coin.

This diverse, ad hoc currency aroused distrust and distaste-a sentiment expressed most belligerently

by Andrew Jackson. No one better expressed American belligerence itself, for that matter: he once killed a man in a duel, and he was undoubtedly the only President who took the oath of office with two bullets in his body and then had one of them removed (without anesthesia) while in office. In one of his most famous acts as President, he

crushed the Second Bank of the United States, a federally chartered giant that towered over the nation's financial structure.

But Jackson hated the entire currency system. He saw paper bills as a lot of mysterious mumbo jumbo, and bankers as a bunch of unproductive thieves who lived by other men's sweat. In 1836 Jackson drew up the Specie Circular, which decreed that federal lands would be sold only for coin-not the banknotes used by most westward-marching migrants. When consumers rushed to get specie for their notes, banks went down like dominoes, ushering in a stark depression that lasted until 1843.

That crisis was merely a bonfire compared with the firestorm of the Civil War-a conflagration that consumed everything in its path, including the country's cun路ency. As the military and finan-

Robert Morris served as financial godfatlier of tlie American Revolution.

His acumen kept tlie new Republic afloat. cial situation worsened in 1861, panicked note holders rushed to banks and demanded gold. By December, banks had stopped redeeming their notes. With precious metals hoarded and hidden, paper money depreciated radically.

It fell to Congressman Elbridge G. Spaulding, a banker, to solve the crunch.

He authored an act for a national paper currency that became known as legal-tenders, or, more commonly, greenbacks.

After July I, 1863, these notes were used for all debts except customs duties, and they could not be redeemed for specie.

The immensity of this innovation can easily be missed, as we look back from our specie-free society. But at the time it was stunning. Unlike virtually every other paper note in American history, the greenback did not represent an underlying commodity. It could not be redeemed in gold or silver-or tobacco, or wampum-then or in the future.

Probably the first thing the greenback purchased was outrage. "Gold and silver are the only true measure of value," one influential banker thundered. "These metals were prepared by the Almighty."

"I prefer gold to paper money," agreed Senator John Sherman. "But there is no other resort. We must have money or a

fractured Government." But critics found plenty of ammunition in a rather peculiar market in New York City that the greenback created, known as the Gold Room.

For the first time, gold had a price.

The law recognized the greenback and the old gold dollar as equals, but in the Gold Room (officially established in

1864), traders exchanged the two kinds of money, paying extra greenbacks for the rarer gold. The market, in fact, was an economic necessity, since international purchases were made in the yellow metal, while the domestic economy used paper money almost exclusively.

For Jay Gould, the market would be a

hunting ground. In 1869 the famed financier and his friend and partner, James Fisk, Jr., had just made their mark on Wall Street by besting Cornelius Vanderbilt in a fight for the Erie Railroad. Now Gould led his friend to the Gold Room.

On the surface, Gould's plan was simple: he would corner the market. That is, he would create a general craze for gold by purchasing massive quantities and convincing brokers and the public that the price would keep climbing. As buyers joined the frenzy, the price of gold would shoot up.

The primary threat to Gould's scheme was the U.S. Treasury, the biggest player in the market. It could undercut the price of gold through its large sales of the specie it acquired through customs duties.

So Gould spun a web of intrigue around the new President, Ulysses S. Grant. The financier bribed Grant's brother-in-law, Abel Corbin, to argue for a freeze on U.S. gold sales. Gould corrupted Daniel S. Butterfield, the assistant treasurer in New York, for inside information.

On June 15, 1869, Gould and Fisk lobbied Grant himself on a passage to Boston aboard one of Gould's steamships. "We went down to dinner about nine o'clock," Fisk recalled, "intending while we were there to have the thing pretty thoroughly talked up, and, if possible to relieve him of any idea of putting the price of gold down." They came in for a shock: Grant was not interested.

But Gould knew that perception was as important as reality in the markets, so he created the impression that Grant was solidly behind them. Apparently, Gould even set up an account for First Lady Julia Dent Grant. "Mr. Gould," Fisk later told Congress, "sold $500,000 of gold belonging to Mrs. Grant .. .leaving her a balance of about $27,000." In September, the price of the precious metal went up, thanks in part to the two financiers' purchases and shrewd use of the press.

Desperate to drive the market still higher, the conspirators pressured Abel Corbin to send the President one last plea for a moratorium on Treasury gold sales.

Gould had gone too far. Grant, too, had

heard the rumors of his own complicity; when Corbin's note interrupted a croquet game, Grant angrily ordered his wife to write back and tell Corbin, "My husband is very much annoyed with your speculations.

You must close them as quick as you can!"

"Mr. Corbin, I am undone if that letter gets out," Gould said. "If you will remain in and take the chances of the market I will give you my check for $100,000." Then the mogul left for the Gold Room, where he bid the price to new heights.

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hen, unknown to everyoneeven his partners-Gould began selling the bulk of his gold. And for good reason: Grant quickly ordered his Treasury secretary to dump gold on the market to stop the craze. A sale of $4 million in government specie was all it took to shatter the confidence of speculators.

The market crashed on September 24, 1869, a day immediately dubbed Black Friday. Fisk later summed up the disaster succinctly: it was "each man drag out his own corpse." Gould, however, strolled away, very much alive, with a rumored $11 million in profits.

Black Friday added to a growing sense that America's money had become too abstract, too detached from the physical and metaphorical weightiness of precious metals. Congress suffered from nagging worries that the greenback was somehow dishonest-that, with the war over, a proud nation should redeem its currency in gold. The debate had even penneated the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson in 1868. Many Republican senators had been reluctant to convict him because his designated successor, Senator Banjamin Wade, was a "soft money" man who wanted to print more greenbacks.

But to cash-starved Westerners and Southerners, legal tenders meant reI ief.

When the Supreme Court declared the legal-tender laws (and thus greenbacks for certain debts) unconstitutional in 1870, Grant won popular acclaim by

adding two new appointments to the Court to overturn the decision in 1871.

The fight between hard money and soft money dominated politics, due to the continuing money shortage after the Civil War: in 1879 there were only $72 per person in existence. While hard-money men pleaded for the honesty of the gold standard, softmoney advocates believed that there just wasn't enough specie to keep up with economic expansion.

Such conditions led to the rise of the descriptively named Greenback party. It briefly proved to be one of the most successful third-party movements in history: it won a million votes in 1878, electing 14 Congressmen. Nevertheless, the nation went back on the gold standard in 1879. Then a strange thing happened: the debate suddenly ended. The former Greenbackers gave in to the idea that paper currency had to be backed up by precious metals. True, they still wanted to expand the money supply; but now they argued that silver should be added to gold as the specie basis of the currency-an idea called bimetallism. Wimam Jennings Bryan, for example, won the Democratic nomination for the Presidency in 1896 with his "Cross of Gold" speech, which summed up Western and rural fury with Eastern gold-standard purists. But despite the intensity of the debate, the real war of ideas was over: the dollar, they agreed, had to be intrinsically valuable.

Jay Gould was a notorious speculator whose manipulations caused the crash of the gold market, September 24,1869.

Ironically, money was simultaneously becoming more and more abstract in actual practice. The culprits were the banks, which spread rapidly into even rural areas after the Civil War. Banks, in fact, were becoming the medium of the medium of exchange, as the checking account began to replace actual notes.

Money was now largely a matter of

ledger books, not stacks of gold or even paper notes. The establishment of the Federal Reserve System (known as the Fed) in 1913 confirmed this trend. Its 12 regional banks held the reserve accounts for member institutions; when checks cleared between banks, the Fed would

make a ledger entry, deducting one reserve account and crediting another.

The Fed also controlled the supply of paper currency: the new Federal Reserve note, the first version of the bills we use today. More importantly, the Fed could make it more or less costly for banks to

expand their reserves and thus their loans.

This system is still largely in place today.

But the cable that held the drifting supply of money to the deadweight of gold had not yet been cut. Each bank still had to maintain a fund for redeeming notes in specie; the amount of gold set an absolute

limit on the number of dollars in circulation-as the nation would soon learn.

On October 24, 1929, the greatest financial panic in American history rolled across the economy like a tsunami, leaving behind a wrecked and desolate country.

Endless debates have raged over the caus-

Left: Keeping track of the stacks of gold bullion. Above: Neat piles of ingots infront of cages in the vault, Federal Reserve Bank of New York. In todays complex financial world, the supremacy of the gold standard is a memory. Gold treasuries like this one have become curiosities.

es of the crisis, but the results were all too clear: the money supply simply shriveled.

Frightened depositors emptied their accounts to get cash; frightened banks called in loans. For many, even Federal Reserve notes weren't good enough: they handed them over for gold, which they hoarded. By 1933 the money supply had shrunk by at least a quarter; more than

5,000 banks had come crashing down.

As Franklin Delano Roosevelt entered the White House that March, he realized that the currency had to be freed from the anchor of gold. Soon after taking the oath of office, he issued an extraordinary executive order that nationalized the nation's coin and bullion: gold was to be handed over to the Treasury, in return for Federal Reserve notes (which were more likely to circulate).

With Congress's help, Roosevelt made it illegal to own gold (except for industrial and artistic purposes); he also stopped minting gold coins and redeeming paper dollars for gold.

But behind the scenes more subtle and much farther-reaching plans were being prepared. For all of the psychological importance of specie and Federal Reserve notes, the real job of making new money fell not to government printing presses but to the loan offices of banks.

In earlier times, consumers needed to trust in specie redemption before they would accept paper notes; now they had to trust in the durability of banks before they would make deposits, take out loans, or write and accept checks. So the federal government quietly pomed a billion dollars into bank stocks and established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (which reassured conswners that they would not lose their savings if a bank went belly-up).

As a result of the New Deal reforms, American money is more abstract than ever before. It also works better than it ever has.

Since the end of the Great Depression, the United States has not suffered a single financial panic-a stretch of more than 60 years, the longest in history.

Most dollars today have no physical existence. Even ledger books began to disappear in the I960s and '70s, replaced by computer records.

The Federal Reserve System processes an average of $2.1 trillion each day through an electronic network known as Fedwire.

Meanwhile, credit card companies, insmance companies, mortgage firms and retirement funds (among others) compete with banks to generate loans.

The gold standard has sunk without a trace in this vast and complex sea of financial institutions-but it did not immediately die off in 1933. Under the Bretton Woods accord of ] 944, the value of the dollar was set at $35 per ounce of gold, but only dollars held by foreign officials could be redeemed for U.S. specie (most of which was, and is, kept at FOit Knox, Kentucky). At the gold vault under the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, countries could pay each other simply by shifting so many bars from one cage to another. But a severe drain on American gold reserves caused the United States to restrict and ultimately halt specie payments, leading to the end of the international gold standard in 1971.

Today, the New York gold vault sits mostly in silence. Although individual transactions are kept secret, those that occur are generally withdrawals, as nations sell bullion on the open market. A lot of its daily activity consists of visits by tourists-a fitting reminder that the vault is essentially a curiosity, a throwback to the age when Americans believed that money had to be something valuable in and of itself. Now money is largely a unit of account-it exists simply because we say it is there. And gold is just another asset like stocks, bonds or real estateexcept it is less popular as an investment.

In American history, money has gone from tobacco to gold to greenbacks to ledger books to electrons. Today our institutionalized, interconnected economy resembles an electronic circuit, with money constantly flowing through it like an electric current. No, not like an electric current-it is an electric current, powering our globally wired world.

D About the Author: TJ. Stiles is a New Yorkbased writer and independent historian. He has also published a series of books about the Civil War and Reconstruction era. He began the study of money and banking as part of his research for a biography of the bandit Jesse James.

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hree dozen middle-aged rebels in business suits are gathered for lunch in a conference room on the top floor of the LaSalle Bank building in Chicago. They have come for sandwiches, and for spiritual sustenance, and before long they are floating radical ideas: Work less. Slow down. Stop multitasking. Listen to your heart.

The burly, long-haired man stirring up this talk is a 59-yearold scholar, theologian, and health-care consultant named Jack Shea. As the business people recount the pressures they face, Shea recalls a Latin phrase from parochial school: Age quod agis. Do what you do, it means, and do it with all of yourself.

"We've all had the experience of having much too much to do, getting frustrated, and finally saying, 'Oh, the hell with it,' and giving up," Shea says. "Doing less means you can work from the center of yourself. It means you can work from your soul."

Work from your soul. That, too, sounds subversive. Yet that goal is what animates these executives, most of them Catholic, who belong to a Chicago-area group called Business Leaders for Excellence, Ethics, and Justice (BEEJ). For more than a decade they have wrestled with big questions: How can business promote family life? What is a just wage? When are layoffs justified? They have held dialogues with bishops, published papers, and guided one another through crises. They say the struggle to integrate faith with work is never-ending. Lately they find their numbers have grown a lot.

"Why would we want to look for God in our work?" asks BEEJ co-founder Gregory F.A. Pearce, a publishing executive and the author of a new book called Spirituality@Work. "The simple answer is most of us spend so much time working, it would be a shame if we couldn't find God there. A more complex answer is that there is a creative energy in work that is somehow tied to God's creative energy. If we can understand that connection, perhaps we can use it to transform the workplace into something remarkable."

These executives are in the vanguard of a diverse, mostly unorganized mass of believers-a counterculture bubbling up all over corporate America-who want to bridge the traditional divide between spirituality and work. Historically, such folk operated below the radar, on their own or in small workplace groups where they prayed or studied the Bible. But now they are getting organized and going public to agitate for change.

• A conference at the business school of Santa Clara

University, a Jesuit institution in Silicon Valley, begins with the chime of a Tibetan bowl, a reading from the Sufi mystic Rumi, and a few moments of silent meditation. Executives, academics, and theologians then discuss such topics as how to find one's true calling. "There were two things I thought I'd never see in my life," says Andre DelBecq, a management professor and organizer of the event, "the fall of the Russian empire and God being spoken about at a business school."

• At a lecture series called Faith@Work organized by the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City, the senior pastor, the Reverend Dr. Thomas K. Tewell, urges business people to become "points of distribution" for God's love in the marketplace.

"Are you willing to be a channel in the divine economy?" he asks.

• At a church retreat near San Antonio, parishioners listen to the message of "everyday Christianity" delivered by David Miller, a former IBM executive and investment banker who now leads a faith-in-the-workplace group called the Avodah Institute. Miller, 44, left business to study at Princeton Theological Seminary, not to flee corporate America but to help knit closer ties between business and religion. "People often talk about the sacred-secular divide," he says, "but my faith tells me that God is found in earth and rocks and buildings and institutions, and, yes, in the business world." Avodah, a Hebrew word, means both "work" and "worship."

The spiritual revival in the workplace reflects, in part, a broader religious reawakening in America, which remains one of the world's most observant nations. (Depending on how the question is asked, as many as 95 percent of Americans say they believe in God; in much of Western Europe, the figure is closer to 50 percent.) The Princeton Religious Research Index, which has tracked the strength of organized religion in America since World War II, reports a sharp increase in religious beliefs and practices since the mid-1990s. When the Gallup Poll asked Americans in 1999 if they felt a need to experience spiritual growth, 78 percent said yes, up from 20 percent in 1994; nearly half said they'd had occasion to talk about their faith in the workplace in the past 24 hours. Sales of Bibles and prayer books, inspirational volumes, and books about philosophy and Eastern religions are growing faster than any other category, with the market expanding from $1.69 billion to about $2.24 billion in the past five years, according to the Book Industry Study Group. Literally hundreds of those titles address spiritual-

ity at work, from Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, and nondenominational perspectives.

"Spirituality in the workplace is exploding," declares Laura Nash, a senior research fellow at Harvard Business School who has followed the topic for a decade. But while the movement to bring spirituality to work has spawned countless books and conferences-including a major gathering to be held in April in New York, at which the Dalai Lama is scheduled to speak to global business leaders-no author, guru, clergyman, or celebrity CEO has emerged as its leader. It's vety much a grassroots affair.

People who want to mix God and business are rebels on several fronts. They reject the centuries-old American conviction that spirituality is a private matter. They challenge religious thinkers who disdain business as an inherently impure pursuit. (The great Harvard theologian Paul Tillich once wrote, "Any serious Christian must be a socialist.") They disagree with business people who say that religion is unavoidably divisive. Most of all, they refuse to bow to the all too common notion that much of the work done in corporate America must be routine, dull, and meaningless; they want and expect more. Says author Greg Pierce: "I like to think of us as the anti-Dilberts." In other words, the goal here isn't to rally the troops behind yet another office blood drive; it's to make the workplace a more ethical and humane arena, one where believers and nonbelievers alike can find fulfillment.

None of that is entirely new, of course. In fact, Fortune in 1953 published an article titled "Businessmen on Their Knees"-yes, those were the days when women and non-Christians weren't welcome in the executive suite-which reported that "American businessmen are taking more notice of God." The story noted that prayer groups were forming and that religious books were climbing up the bestseller lists, and asked, "Is it a superficial, merely utilitarian movement, or is it a genuinely spiritual awakening?"

Then, as now, the topic caused some people's hackles to rise.

As much as Americans say they believe in God, most also believe in religious freedom, and hence in the separation of church and boardroom. And considering all the crimes committed in the name of one god or another, it's only natural to imagine zealous executives doing more harm than good. So while the business world has found ways to talk about race, gender equity, sexuality, disability, and even mental il1ness, religion has remained the last taboo.

Now more and more people are willing to talk about bringing faith to work, as the stories that follow attest. They are choosing their words carefully. To avoid tripping over dogma, they speak of "spirituality" and "meaning," not of religion and God. And with reason: One survey of executives found that more than 60 percent had positive feelings about spirituality and a negative view of rei igion. "We can't and shouldn't and don't want to drive people to a particular religious belief," says Bill Pol1ard, chairman of ServiceMaster, a Fortune 500 company committed explicitly to serving God. "But we do want people to ask the fundamental questions. What's driving them? What is this life all about?"

ServiceMaster has been talking openly about God and business

ever since the Depression, when its founder, having survived a flash fire, dedicated his business to serving the Lord. Outside its headquatiers in Downers Grove, Illinois, stands a statue of Christ washing the feet of his disciples. The company generates nearly $6 billion a year in revenues from such brands as Terminix, TruGreen, ChemLawn, and Meny Maids, but it's best known for a spiritual culture that has won praise from the likes of management guru Peter Drucker. All employees get stock, promotional oppotiunities, and the chance to be heard, and no one eat'ns more than 12 times the salary paid the lowest-level worker.

The thing is, ServiceMaster exemplifies how hard it is to live up to saintly standards. Profits are down at ServiceMaster, and its Terminix pest-control unit has run afoul of regulators in several states; it admitted ripping off customers in Kentucky and polluting a stream in Pennsylvania. Pol1ard regrets the lapses but argues that they are inevitable in a company with 75,000 employees and another 175,000 "associates" who are supervised

by ServiceMaster. "There is no management-control system that can manage those people to always do the right thing," he says.

As ServiceMaster's woes make clear, spirituality in no way guarantees material success. It may not even correlate with wordly riches. "I've seen a lot of not-very-good human beings succeed in business," observes investor Warren Buffett. "I wish it were otherwise."

What, then, is driving the resurgence of interest in spirituality and work? It's not the business cycle. Groups like Legatus, an organization of about 1,300 Catholic CEOs, have been growing steadily for more than a decade, since long before the market ballooned and then popped. Most likely, what's happening now is generational.

Yes, the baby-boomers are at it again-the same cohort, if not the same people, who brought us the 1960s youth culture and the greedy 1980s now want their work to deliver more than a paycheck. As they turn 50, they're anxious to know what really matters. As Greg Pierce says, "We've always been a very introspective group-which is the polite way of putting it. Actually we think the world revolves around us. We're reaching the top of our careers, we're kind of where we're going to be, and now we're saying, What's it all about, Alfie?" Or as one executive put it at a conference on spirituality at work, "You get to the top of the ladder and find that maybe it's leaning against the wrong building."

In a book called The Fourth Great Awakening & the Future of Egalitarianism, Robert William Fogel, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at the University of Chicago, argues that post-World War II prosperity has created enough wealth that many Americans' primary desires are not for material goods but for spiritual and intellectual assets. "In a world in which all but a small percentage are lacking in adequate nutrition and other necessities, self-realization may indeed seem like a mere ornament," he writes, "but not in a country where even the poor are rich by past or Third World standards. That is the case in America today."

Before proceeding further, let's briefly stipulate what this story is not about. It's not about deploying spirituality in your

company to boost productivity or soothe workers' psyches. Nor is this story about business ethics. Behaving ethically is a necessary but not sufficient component of integrating faith and work, says David Miller of the Avodah Institute. "This is about who you are, your being, your character within the organization," Miller says. "It's going beyond minimum obligation to being motivated by love of neighbor. Let's say you're in banking. What are you proactively doing to get involved in inner-city lending? How do we treat the migrant worker, the single mom, the illegal alien? These are the modern-day equivalents of the biblical poor." Of course, none of this is intended to suggest that only spiritual people can lead exemplary lives.

No, the stories that follow are about people who struggle to resolve the tensions between business and God. Marketplace pressures frequently bump up against spiritual values, as business people tackle questions that reverberate beyond the bottom line: How to handle layoffs. How much to pay people. How to reach out to others in a loving way. How to react to unethical conduct.

How to make money-of course-and make meaning too.

Never on Sunday elling dishwashers and dinette sets has always come easily to Bill Child. Selling his chain of furniture stores to Wan'en Buffett was easy too-the best business decision he's ever made, he says. But selling the Omaha billionaire on a risky plan for expanding the business-well, that proved tougher, especially when Child's religious practices collided head-on with Buffett's business sense.

Child, 69, is the soft-spoken chairman of R.C. Willey Home Furnishings, a Utah-based retailer that he built up and sold to Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett's holding company, for an estimated $150 million in 1995. Several years later Child had his heart set on opening a new store in Las Vegas, so he took Buffett for a ride-literally. Touring Vegas and its suburbs by helicopter, the two men marveled at the new subdivisions that sprawled in all directions. Child had his eye on a location in upscale Clark County, where an estimated 8,000 newcomers arrive every month-nearly all needing furniture.

There was just one problem. R.C. Willey stores have always closed on Sundays because Child, a devout Mormon, observes the Sabbath. So do many of his managers who are also members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. That was no handicap as long as Child stayed close to his roots in Salt Lake City: With nine stores, all in Utah, where most people are Monnon, R.C. Willey had become the biggest fumiture retailer west of the Mississippi. Sales last year topped $400 million.

But Las Vegas? Without Sunday hours? Buffett wouldn't go for it. "Sunday is an enormously popular day for a great many people to shop for a lot of things, and celiainly for furniture and appliances," says Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway owns three other furniture companies, all of which are open on

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Sundays. Industry experts estimate that 20 percent to 30 percent of all furniture sales are transacted on Sundays. Buffett worried that customers who drove to the store to shop on Sundays would be frustrated and never come back.

To resolve the dispute, the two plain-spoken Westerners struck an unorthodox compromise: They would hold off on Vegas and instead test R.C. Willey's approach outside Utah by building a store in Boise-not Sin City but not a Mormon stronghold either. Buffett still had doubts, so to allay them, Child insisted on paying for the new store himself. He put up $9 million, with the proviso that if the Boise store took hold, he would sell it back to Berkshire Hathaway at cost; if it failed, he'd eat the losses. Of course, the store would be closed on Sundays.

For Child, Sundays have been set aside for church, family, and rest as long as he can remember. As a young man he intended to become a schoolteacher; he got into retailing almost by accident when, after college, he was handed the keys to a 6O-square-meter R.C. Willey store by his ailing father-in-law, Rufus Willey.

Child didn't know much about business, but he knew the store was in trouble. "If I'd had a business education, I probably would have closed it," he says. The one thing R.C. Willey had going for it was its reputation. Rufus knew his customers personally, having met them when he worked for the electric company, climbing utility poles and bringing electricity to rural farmers; evenings and weekends he sold them appliances on credit from his red pickup truck. He'd ask farm families to try a refrigerator or electric range for a week. Says Child: "I don't think he ever had to take one back."

Nearly 50 years later Child has built the business into a powerhouse retailer by combing the world for unusual products and offering a vast an'ay of electronics and appliances as well as furniture. But he says the company's reputation remains its most prized asset. He tells his 2,000 employees to be scrupulously honest, even when they could shade the truth about, say, when an outof-stock item will become available. His customer service people take returns with no questions asked. "If we foul up, in any way, we go to all ends to satisfY people," Child says. A while ago R.C. Willey decided to stand behind thousands of product warranties it had sold to an insurance company that went bankrupt. "It cost us more than $1.5 million over the next five years," Child says, "but we just felt it was the morally right thing to do." Other stores told customers they could no longer honor the warranties.

Child believes that Sunday closings have actually contributed to R.C. Willey's success. In a tight labor market, he says, he can attract workers who want to spend the day with family. And everyone at R.C. Willey-even the workaholic who might be tempted to check on sales figures or stop by an outlet-gets a true day of rest on Sunday because the entire business is shut down.

Whatever the reason, R.C. Willey proved to be a hit in Boise.

Several months after the store opened in 1999, Berkshire Hathaway bought the property from Child-who refused to take any interest on the capital he had tied up. In Berkshire's annual

repOli, Buffett wrote, "If a manager has behaved similarly at some other public corporation, I haven't heard about it."

Last September, R.C. Willey opened its lIth store, in Henderson, Nevada, just outside Las Vegas. It is open until very late at night, but is closed on Sundays. Buffett, a self-professed agnostic, told Child, "You impressed me in Boise. Now, if you can do it in Vegas, you'll make a real convert out of me."

God Is Her CEO an a management consultant whose expertise is mergers and acquisitions, with their attendant downsizing and sometimes nasty culture clashes, do God's work? And on Wall Street, no less?

Absolutely, although it's not always easy, says Jose Zeilstra.

Zeilstra spent eight years as a globe-trotting consultant at Price Waterhouse, which became PricewaterhouseCoopers after she joined, before she was recruited two years ago by J.P. Morgan, which was then acquired by Chase Manhattan. (You can see how she's become a merger expert.) Zeilstra loves her job; she's a vice president, part of an in-house consulting unit that deals with strategy, leadership, and productivity issues. And, yes, she says, she feels she has been able to live her faith at both Pricewaterhouse and J.P. Morgan Chase-by encouraging executives to look up from their spreadsheets to focus on people and values, by arguing for what's right, and by trying to act with compassion. She's guided as much by the Bible as by any corpOl路ate dictate or business school text.

"Ultimately I'm working for God," Zeilstra says matter-offactly. "There is no higher calling than to serve God, and that does not mean only within the church. Ultimately, your life, whether it's work, family, or friends, is pali of a larger plan."

Born in the Netherlands, the 34-year-old Zeilstra moved as a child to Calgary, where her father ran a real estate business. The churches she attended delivered the message that the best way to be a Christian was to work as a minister or missionary. "You almost felt that going into business was anti-Christian because it was only about money and power and materialism," she says.

Even so, intrigued by business, she earned an MBA and went to work at Price Waterhouse. She worked on a merger of cement companies in Indonesia, spent a year in China consulting for the central bank, assisted with a failed telecom merger, and helped a major airline outsource its catering and cleaning operations.

Her Christian principles were tested in big ways and small.

Working overseas, she had to contend with cultures in which bribes and kickbacks were the norm. On one occasion she argued against giving what she calls "very expensive gifts" and saw a deal fall through. Another time she worked for an executive who berated subordinates, bad-mouthed the locals, and had an office affair. She urged him to change, after first praying for guidance. "When you feel God is with you, you get a little bit bolder," Zeilstra says. "But you have to do it diplomatically.

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What's the phrase? You love the sinner and you hate the sin."

But why step in at all? "It was my role to help him see how he was impacting other people."

More typically she tries to lead by example. She seeks, for instance, to avoid office gossip or backbiting. God tells us, she says, "to slander no one, to be peaceable and considerate, and to show humility to all." Her goal is to treat everyone, whatever their rank, with dignity and respect.

That is the nub of both Zeilstra's faith and her consulting practice: Leaders who are guided by spiritual principles should thrive in the new economy. Speaking at a conference on faith and work at New York City's Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, where she worships, Zeilstra argued that business leaders no longer needed to "flex muscles, drive loyalty, and institutionalize hierarchy."

Instead, they must be "attuned to people and ideas" and able to miiculate a vision and imbue others with purpose. She argued that Jesus Christ was history's greatest leader: In less than 40 years on emih He began a global organization that today has more than a billion followers.

Now Zeilstra is in the thick of yet another merger-the J.P. Morgan-Chase integration, which top executives have said will eliminate thousands of jobs. While she is not in a position to make policy (or speak for the firm), she tells those in charge of layoffs, "Err a little bit on the generous side. You always want to do what you can to reduce the pain and be thought of as a fair and caring employer." That may seem obvious, but as the recent waves of dotcom layoffs showed, some employers can be shockingly casual about the way they throw people out of work.

On the job, Zeilstra uses secular language and avoids the "G" word. Aside from that, she feels few conflicts between her faith and her work. The biggest challenge, sometimes, is keeping her own perspective in a workplace in which twentysomethings can take home million-dollar pay packages. Zeilstra herself enjoys heli-skiing, horseback riding, and scuba diving, and she's learning to fly a plane. Wealth, she confesses, can be seductive: "When you ask how you bring God into your work, it's by not getting caught up in making money or achieving power so that they become your gods."

The Sounds of Silence Otmany couliroom lawyers can shut their mouths for an hour, let alone a day or a week. But Thomas Crisman, a patent attorney and litigator with Jenkens & Gilchrist, a big corporate-law firm in Dallas, leaves his business behind every winter to spend a month in silence at a meditation retreat in rural India. He does so to deepen his practice of an increasingly popular form of Buddhist meditation known as Vipassana.

Ordinarily a voluble man, the 59-year-old Crisman actually looks forward to his month of silence. "The transition can be difficult," he says. "You're coming out of a high-speed, high-energy, hard-driving world, and you're moving to a much quieter,

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more peaceful place." But the payoff is worth it, so much so that Crisman has taken a month-long retreat in India every year since 1980, when he met S. . Goenka, a onetime Myanmar industrialist who is now among the world's leading meditation teachers.

Back home, Crisman and his wife, Tina, operate a Vipassana Website (www.dhamma.org) and oversee a meditation center in Kaufman, Texas, that puts between 500 and 1,000 people a year through a 10-day introductory silent Vipassana course.

Vipassana meditation has been described as a journey of discovery, taken with the eyes closed. As Crisman explains it, practitioners observe their breathing, thought patterns, and physical sensations during meditation and train themselves not to react negatively to life's inevitable stresses. Instead, they strive to respond "in a balanced way, without allowing events to whipsaw you." Buddhists believe that practicing meditation helps restore people to a natural state, filled with love and compassion. "I don't know anybody who has been through the full 10 days who doesn't come out the other side of it, really, a different person," Crisman says. "It's like scrubbing the paint off the outside ofthe light bulb and letting the light shine through."

Raised as a Baptist in West Texas, Crisman discovered meditation after experiencing a mix of career success and personal discontent. When a fellow patent lawyer named Jack Holder invited him to a retreat, Crisman figured he had nothing to lose.

Holder, who recalls that Crisman cried for 45 minutes when the retreat ended, says, "I knew then that something had happened."

Crisman was so taken with Vipassana that he arranged to spend several months in India and considered quitting the law.

"Fighting people all the time-that didn't seem like a very good way to make a living," Crisman says. Goet1ka talked him out of it, saying that the law can be a tool to help people and that professionals like Crisman can spread the word about Vipassana among their peers.

As a partner at a big firm, Crisman now compresses his workload into about 10 months a year. "I'll work 12-hour days, some seven-day weeks, pretty much from mid-January until December, and I'll end up billing more hours than almost anybody else" he says. "Then I go off to India, and my partners go off skiing." Colleagues manage his cases when he's gone.

He has made other adjustments too. He turned down legal work from a client who operated a Texas slaughterhouse.

(Buddhism asks that its followers do no harm to "sentient beings," although Crisman himself eats meat.) Another client asked him to apply for patents for machine-gun technology.

"The guy's a good client, and pays well, and he's a friend too," Crisman says. "But I just couldn't bring myself to do it."

But Crisman's no less forceful an advocate; to the contrary, he argues that bringing calmness and perspective to a bitter couti battle gives him an edge over an emotional adversary. "You can't lie down and roll over when these jerks come along.

You've got to push back," says Crisman. "But to do it without the agitation, without the suffering, with a balanced mind-that was probably the No. I thing that I saw happen to me in my law

practice." Stan Moore, a law partner and friend, says, "Most attorneys look forward to the cocktail hour to go out and drown their stresses. Tom goes to meditate."

"Sinful Desserts, Saintly Causes" hen Julius Walls Jr. gave up his dream of becoming a Catholic priest at age 19 because he wanted a family, he felt certain he was leaving the ministry behind forever. Now he's not so sure.

As chief executive of Greyston Bakery, a maker of gourmet brownies, cakes, and tmis in Yonkers, New York, Walls runs a business that is explicitly guided by spiritual principles. He hires people off the street, first come, first served, because he thinks everyone deserves a shot at a job. The company helps its workers with problems whether or not they're job related. Meetings begin with a moment of silence. And all the bakery's profits, roughly $200,000 in 2000, go to the Greyston Foundation, which helps the needy. Says Walls: "I think of a lot of what I do here at Greyston as my ministry."

Greyston serves the poor by feeding the rich. Much of its $4 million in annual sales are generated by selling bits of brownies to Ben & Jerry's for its chocolate fudge brownie ice cream and frozen yoguli. Greyston also bakes cakes and tarts for Manhattan restaurants and cafes, creates elaborate cakes to order, and sells desserts like Triple Chocolate Mousse Cake and Lemon Tart over the Internet (www.greystonbakery.com).

In a Zagat survey of 160 ew York City area bakeries, Greyston ranks just behind top-rated Payard, a French patisserie on the Upper East Side. Greyston, says Zagat's, offers "sinful desserts that sUppOti saintly causes."

Walls, now 39, happened upon Greyston almost by accident, although he sees divine forces at work. ("I was supposed to be here, honestly," he says.) The son of a prison guard, he grew up in a Brooklyn housing project and attended a Catholic high school and seminary on scholarship. Later he studied business at Baruch College, where he was elected student body president. An outgoing man of strong opinions, Walls rose through the ranks ofa New York chocolate manufacturer, where he made good money but chafed at the way that traditional companies treated people. "It was a matter of us vs. them," he said. "You paid the least amount possible to your employees and suppliers, and you charged the most you could to your customers." He wondered whether he'd ever be able to marry his faith with his business skills.

In J 993 he made a sales call at Greyston. There, Walls, who is African American, was impressed that the bakery was staffed by poor blacks and Hispanics from Yonkers, a blighted city just north of the Bronx. Walls wangled ajob as a marketing consultant and was named CEO in 1997-by which time he'd come to appreciate the venture's spiritual underpinnings.

Founded in 1982, Greyston was the brainchild of a Zen Buddhist and entrepreneur known as Roshi Bernard Glassman.

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Bom a Jew in Brooklyn, Glassman had worked as an aeronautical engineer for McDonnell Douglas before turning to Zen. He created the bakery to suppoli a Zen group called the Peacemaker Community-and to bridge the worlds of the spirit, the street, and the startup.

What Walls brought to Greyston was business savvy, Christian faith, and a strong ethic of personal responsibility. Greyston remains "spiritual," he says, but its aim isn't to produce Buddhists or Christians; rather it's to support people as they pursue their own path. The company maintains a three-person department, overseen by a social worker, to help employees with problems ranging from landlord-tenant disputes to marital discord. Workers also get lots of on-the-job training, grants for education, and even help writing a resume if they decide to seek a job elsewhere.

Of the 55 Greyston employees, many are working for the first time or are former substance abusers or convicted criminals.

Walls explains his "open hiring" policy by saying, "Everyone deserves an opportunity for a job. Period." Workers then must prove themselves during a 12- to 16-week tryout.

That reflects a bedrock principle at Greyston: People are responsible for their actions. That may seem self-evident, but Walls says the welfare system has created a class of people who have been taught to depend on others. Still, he preaches self-sufficiency in the context of a caring workplace where people are willing to listen to one another and lend a helping hand. That, he argues, is enlightened capitalism. "As we've taken care of our employees," he says, "our employees have taken care of this business."

Praying for Answers or 25 years after starting Catalytica in his basement in New Providence, New Jersey, Ricardo Levy proudly watched it grow from a tiny consulting firm into a pharmaceuticals and energy company with headquarters in Silicon Valley, a factory in Greenville, North Carolina, 1,800 employees, and a market capitalization of $750 million. Then Levy faced one of the most difficult decisions of his business careerwhether to sell the company's biggest, most successful division.

"I had never considered selling," says Levy, a reflective 56year-old chemical engineer. "An entrepreneur wants to keep the baby and take it all the way." To complicate matters, Levy took a strong dislike to the point man for the potential buyer, a Dutch pharmaceuticals giant called DSM. That Levy ultimately chose to sell most of Catalytica is, by itself, unremarkable. But the way he made the decision-by turning to an ancient Christian tradition known as discernment, in which one quiets the mind and surrenders to the unknown, attempting to discover the will of God-well, let's just say that's not a management tool taught in many business schools these days.

As it happens, though, that's just where Levy discovered discernment. In 1998 he took a pilot course in Spirituality for Business Leaders at the University of Santa Clara's business school, taught

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by Andre DeIBecq, a management professor and devout Catholic.

Levy, who is Jewish, had long been interested in philosophy and religion, patiicularly the Eastern traditions; he has, for example, practiced tai chi, a physical discipline rooted in Taoism. Like many baby-boomers, Levy has fashioned his own brand of spirituality, which draws from a number of religious traditions.

"For me, spirituality is a very individual issue," he says.

"Although I consider myself fully Jewish, I'm not a member ofa synagogue. Those of us who are less affiliated have to uncover our own path, and that's hard. Especially when, at the same time, we are CEOs of fast-growing companies."

Certainly business is in Levy's blood, as is a family history shaped by religion. The son of a Jewish entrepreneur who fled Nazi Germany to Ecuador, Levy spoke German at home and Spanish at school; he learned English well enough to earn advanced degrees fi'om Princeton and Stanford. After a stint at Exxon, he joined with two colleagues to form Catalytica. In time they developed two promising technologies-a combustion system that reduces pollution fi'om fossil fuels and an efficient way to manufacture complex pharmaceuticals. They raised venture capital, took their company public, and grew by acquisition, becoming one of the drug industry's biggest contract manufacturers; their products included AZT, the anti-AIDS drug, and Sudafed.

Levy's world had become terribly hectic and complex by the time he took DelBecq's course. He read spiritual books, began meditating every morning, and took a "field trip" to a homeless shelter. He practiced humility, making a deliberate effort to become a better listener and stay in touch with his people as the business grew. "That means recognizing that the fact that you have made a million dollars means squat," he says. From his meditation practice, Levy says he learned how to "quiet the innumerable noises that an executive hears." It's this quieting of the mind that is at the heati of discernment.

When the offer came to buy Catalytica's phannaceuticals business, Levy had to contemplate a lot of questions. Getting a fair price for investors was essential, but not sufficient. How would selling affect his employees? What about his customers? Could Catalytica's combustion division, which DSM didn't want, survive on its own? And what would he do with the rest of his life?

Levy attacked all the questions logically, and then went deeper. "Those are subtle issues that don't fit into an Excel spreadsheet. It's not writing a list on the left and a list on the right," he says. "It's really more than anything a matter of feeling. The question is, feeling what? Really it's your compass. How your total psyche, how your intellectual and spiritual being interfaces with the issue." This may simply be a more disciplined way of getting to what other executives call a gut decision.

As he made up his mind to sell, Levy also used meditation to overcome the hostility he'd felt toward his DSM adversary. He tried to reach out "in a loving way" and found that his own kinder demeanor helped move the talks along. Catalytica sold its drug business to DSM in 2000; its combustion division is now a stand-alone public company, with Levy as chairman.

Sure, the process sounds a little mushy-Levy knows that-but remember that this is a scientist, an engineer, and a CEO talking.

To skeptics, he says that being spiritually grounded is a way of staying close to the people who are key to any company's success.

"People are the most intangible, the most complex element of any business equation," he says. "The only way to reach people is to start by reaching into yourself-by understanding yourself."

Beyond the Bottom Line

D

ick Green is a modest Midwesterner, a traditional Catholic, and the president of an old-economy manufacturer called Blistex, which makes lip-care products. After more than a decade of trying to integrate his faith and work, he has reached a conclusion that may surprise dewy-eyed theorists who see only harmony between God and business: Sometimes the two collide, head-on.

When they do, Green can allow his conscience to shape his business decisions because Blistex is a privately held, familyc owned firm, and a profitable one. (He won't disclose revenues or profits, although he says that a published estimate that Blistex brought in $59 million in sales in 2000 was too low.) Neither Green nor David Arch, Blistex's chairman, feels pressure to squeeze out more cash, because they are part of the family that owns the 54-year-old firm. "We're a very conservative company," Green says. "We just want to keep doing what we're doing."

Green, 62,joined Blistex in 1971, after marrying Patricia Arch, the daughter of Blistex's co-founder, Charles Arch. A chemical engineering graduate of Notre Dame, he rotated through various departments before becoming president in 1990. By then he'd helped start the Chicago-based group now known as Business Leaders for Excellence, Ethics, and Justice, which was formed after Catholic bishops issued an encyclical that was sharply critical of capitalism. "The implication was that profit was a four-letter word," Green says.

While BEEJ was formed to defend business, its leaders soon shifted their focus inward. Drawing upon Catholic theology, they wrote position papers on issues like layoffs, firings, and wage scales. Green's thinking changed, sometimes in unexpected ways; he had, for example, previously found it very hard to fire even underachieving employees, but he came around to the belief that "it's immoral not to fire" those who can't do the job.

But Green also came to see himself as working for his employees rather than the other way around. If, instead, he was hell-bent on maximizing profits, he probably would have long ago moved the factory from suburban Oak Brook, Illinois, to a low-wage locale. "We could make our product cheaper somewhere else," he says. Or Blistex could have outsourced manufacturing altogether.

Green has also opted not to layoff workers during seasonal or economic slowdowns. "We've had people painting machines, we've had people painting the walls, we've had them doing everything to keep them busy," he says. All workers get a profit-shar-

ing benefit, usually pegged at 15 percent of their annual salary. It's paid into their retirement accounts because the company owners figure that most people will be better off saving the money. "Are we too paternalistic?" Green says. "I sometimes wonder."

Fortunately for Green and the other owners, Blistex is thriving. It has increased its earnings for nine of the past 10 years through smati marketing, brand extensions, acquisitions, and global expansion. Blistex could have done even better financially, but that's not really an option for Green. "I don't think I can make a business decision and ignore who I am," he says.

So what are we to make of this efflorescence of spirituality in the business world? Is this a superficial, merely utilitarian movement, or is it a genuinely spiritual awakening?

This was the question Fortune asked in 1953 about the revival of faith among businessmen. Thirteen years later traditional religion had fallen so far out of favor that Time ran a famous cover asking Is GOD DEAD?We simply can't know whether today's ad hoc efforts to integrate faith and work will coalesce into something bigger and more powerful, with long-lasting effects, or whether they will fizzle. Certainly it's no surprise that as babyboomers peer around the corner at mortality, they're asking big questions. A cynic would say they'll soon be into something else-golf, maybe.

Still, change happens. This generation has seen it. Did "Women's Lib" remake the workplace? We'd say yes. Will myway-or-the-highway leadership rise anew? Probably not.

Some believers argue that spirituality will eventually be welcomed into the business world for pragmatic reasons. Faith works, they say. They claim that the core principles of spirituality-the belief that all individuals have dignity, that we are all interconnected, and that a transcendent being or force defines purpose in human affairs-dovetail with contemporary management thinking about what drives great companies. These companies employ the whole person; they don't buy a worker's labor for eight hours a day. They deploy teams of people who respect one another and promote learning and listening up and down the ranks. They have a mission that transcends the bottom line.

"Spirituality is in convergence with all the cutting-edge thinking in management and organizational behavior," says Hamilton Beazley, a former oil-company executive who now teaches at George Washington University. "It creates a higher-performing organization. " In the end, though, it isn't likely that the faith-in-the-workplace movement will be driven by such a practical calculus. Nor will it be guided by consultants and churches. Rather, it will be powered, as it has been so far, by business people who yearn to find meaning in what they do. Whether there are enough of them, with sufficient will, to make a lasting difference remains to be seen, but they have begun talking, and that's a start.

D About the Author: Marc Gunther is a senior writer with Fot1une magazine.

Text by LESLIE ALLEN Photographs by JESSIE COHEN Smithsonian National Zoo

II eyes were on the new first couple, making their Washington debut. The pair proved themselves a model of appropriate behavior that bright, blustery January day.

First, he nuzzled her head with his. Then, she swatted him. Next, he nipped at her neck. Then, she sank her teeth into his ear and held on tenaciously. She let go; he bleated happily.

The then two-year-old Mei Xiang (may sh-ONG) and threeyear-old Tian Tian (t-YEN t-YEN) just kept on at their roughand-tumble on the day their month-long quarantine ended at the Smithsonian National Zoo. The giant pandas had much in common with many other celebrity couples: a crowd of onlookers to scrutinize their every move, for one. Their own plane-in this case a FedEx jet named PandaOne that whisked them in from China's Sichuan Province for their IO-year stay in Washington. A big bankroll-$1 million a year, all from private donors, to fund both their loan to the Zoo and conservation projects to improve giant panda reserves in China. FedEx made its PandaOne available for free. Fujifilm will fund a new state-of-the-alt climatecontrolled habitat for the pandas, and support conservation.

Television's Animal Planet did four one-hour documentaries on the pair which aired last year.

At the Zoo, the pandas tackled, grappled and rolled downhill in a blur of black and white, end over end, to the front of their enclosure. "Ooohh," exhaled the crowd. "Wow," said the normally articulate National Zoo Director Lucy Spelman.

Researchers have identified 11 distinct vocalizations that giant pandas make. In their presence, humans seemed reduced to about as many. Tian Tian and Mei Xiang had their audience, so to speak, under their thumbs-actually, enlarged wristbones, or radial sesamoids, that function as opposable thumbs, allowing giant pandas to manipulate objects.

According to behavioral scientists, those "thumbs" turn out to

Opposite page: Threeyear-old Mei Xiang (" beautiful fragrance ") peers out from a tree limb at the China Research and Conservation Center for the Giant Panda in the mountainous Wolong Nature Reserve. She is one of two giant pandas that arrived in Washington, D.C., in December 2000, on a 10-year loan to the National Zoo. Right, above: Tian rian climbs a log in the foreground as Mei Xiang attends to her toilet, a few days before their Us. debut in January 2001.

Right: Visitors watch the pandas play at the • new Fujifilm Giant Panda Conservation Habitat at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park, Washington, D. C.

be one of the features that make giant pandas so attractive to us.

Humans, of course, also manipulate food and small objects; and we prefer other species that share our own characteristics, scientists say. Pandas, like us, have flat faces (think, for contrast, of cartoon villains like long-snouted wolves and rats). They sit up vertically, as humans do. They have tiny tails; we are tail-less.

And giant pandas give us a slew of visual and other cues that remind us of own babies-big eyes, softness, roundedness, even a hint of clumsiness.

Small wonder, then, that the crowds line up patiently for a chance to go gaga over Mei Xiang and Tian Tian-just as they did for their late predecessors at the National Zoo, Hsing-Hsing and Ling-Ling, who arrived in 1972 as a gift from China. One panda-costumed little girl at the rail says she has 178 panda objects at home; a grown man boasts of 48. Pandas are one ofthe world's most popular animals, and they're also, seemingly, among the most familiar. From backpacks to cookie jars to conservation logos, their image abounds.

The grand irony, of course, is that giant pandas are extremely rare. Logging and agriculture have wiped out almost half of their remaining mountainous, bamboo-covered habitat in southwestern China over just the past two decades. Now, some 1,000 giant pandas survive in the wild-but that's only a guess, because there has been little fieldwork. Quiet and elusive to begin with, pandas inhabit steep, forested, remote terrain that is difficult for humans to negotiate. And until about 1980, the political landscape was even less hospitable. "For years, the West was basically not in China," says Devra G. Kleiman, the Zoo's fmiller assistant director for research and senior research scientist, and a pioneer in panda research. Basic information about giant pandas is still emerging. (Even their perch on the mammalian family tree has shifted from the bear to the raccoon branch-and back to bear-in recent years.)

"In 1972, when Hsing-Hsing and Ling-Ling arrived, we knew practically nothing compared to what we now know," says Kleiman.

Since then, research, especially in reproductive biology and behavior, has perked along at a handful of other zoos and breeding centers-like Mei Xiang's and Tian Tian's birthplace in Wolong Nature Reservethat are home to about 140 captive giant pandas. Until her death in 1992 and his in 1999, Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing ranked among the most intensively studied individual animals ever.

"We don't yet know enough about what's normal," says Zoo Director Spelman, "but captive pandas can help us better understand and help those in the wild."

Over the next 10 years, at least a dozen

new research studies involving Tian Tian and Mei Xiang will investigate everything from stress-hormone levels to circadian rhythms to the dynamics of scent marking. Twenty video cameras will monitor the pandas' every move. (Readers can watch the pandas on the Web at pandas.si.edu/.) Microphones will record every bleat and honk. Scientists will also probe their preferences. Do giant pandas prefer air-cooled or water-cooled grottoes? In Washington's wilting summers, Mei Xiang and Tian Tian will have one of each to choose from-just an example of the many features designed for research and enrichment in their yards, refurbished at a cost of $2.2 million.

Nevertheless, not everything can be planned for in advance.

"4:00: T began pacing," read the keeper's log notes for one January day, "and M began climbing the mesh and hanging on the conduit." The agile Mei Xiang, it seems, had gotten herself into a tight spot by scaling the electrical wire conduit on the outside of the Panda House and wedging herself under the roof overhang. "Being a baby, she just thinks these things are great fun," explains keeper Dianne Murnane, "and then, too late, realizes that she isn't where she wants to be."

Mei is coaxed down. The next day, aluminum facing, too smooth to climb, is installed over the conduit.

This is only one in a string of antics. Within days of their arrival, Tian Tian and Mei Xiang can nimbly operate the water valves in their indoor enclosure. Fortunately, they lose interest Right: The pair check out one of the two new grottoes in the panda complex. Below: Researcher David Powell and a volunteer monitor video, audio and weather systems in the panda enclosure.

before unleashing a flood. Another day, Tian Tian hoists himself onto a platform and tears down an acoustical ceiling tile. It does not take long for someone to suggest that any prison wanting to verify that it is escape-proof might hire Mei Xiang and Tian Tian.

"Their activity level wasn't anticipated," says Michelle Kayon, the Zoo's head of project management, who oversaw the enclosure's renovation. "Even though the Zoo has had pandas before, they were different ones, and older."

"They're not like Hsing," sighs keeper Brenda Morgan, a nine-year Panda House veteran, at the weekly panda management meeting. "I don't know how we'll keep up with these two."

Her voice conveys the loving, weary tone you might expect from a mother of twin toddlers at the end of a long afternoon. "I'm amazed at how much they're awake during the day," she adds.

Kleiman says that giant pandas' exploratory urges rank high in the mammal world-and for good evolutionary reason. "It starts with being bears; so many are omnivores, and they have to do a lot of thinking and processing to find food in different ways."

Then, at some time in the past, for unknown reasons, they made a drastic, sudden switch to an herbaceous diet: bamboo. When they did, their manipulative abilities served them well for holding and breaking the tough stalks. To chew them, giant pandas over time developed enormous molars and muscular jaws-and

those fat, rounded faces that we humans find so adorable.

Adapting to life in dense bamboo groves also had an important impact on the panda's social behavior. Pandas in the wild don't meet each other much. There, scent marking provides long-term communication about identity and reproductive status.

Vocalizations, on the other hand, give immediate feedback; they tell a panda whether an unseen animal is friend or foe, approachable or not. "Their sound communication system is highly evolved," Kleiman says. "They can communicate a huge amount."

Only within the past few years has fieldwork documented the complexity ofthe sounds. "And that is just the beginning."

Lessons learned the hard way bear her out. Kleiman cites the example of a cub born to Ling-Ling in 1987 that survived only four days. "The microphone was on, and the infant's vocalizations changed. Had we known what we learned a few years later in China-that these were distress calls-we'd have pulled the cub earlier" from its mother to give it medical help.

With an animal as endangered as the giant panda, every misstep along the way to successful captive breeding only heightens the sense of urgency. Even more significant than their ignorance about vocalizations, says Kleiman, were the misperceptions that led the Zoo to keep Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing apart from each other except during brief interludes for mating each year. The practice, from China, might have started because of aggressive-

Right: On the Rocks-Tian Tian and Mei Xiang sleep on the rocks in front of their custom-made grotto.

Constructed of natural and imitation rock, the grotto resembles a shallow open cave-2.5 meters wide, 1. 2 meters deep and 1.5 meters tall-within a natural rock outcropping.

Naturally cold in winter, in the summer this grotto is cooled by built-in air conditioners.

Below: Panda pals-Mei Xiang and Tian Tian eat bamboo in the new giant panda enclosure.

Giant pandas are fed about 50 kilograms of bamboo a day.

ness among captives in the days when giant pandas were still taken from the wild. Furthermore, pandas were universally thought to be essentially solitary animals. Kleiman's own research in the 1990s convinced her otherwise.

"Keeping them apart was wrong," she says flatly. "They are more social than anyone could have believed." Among other things, she points out, if they were really solitary, you would not expect such complex vocalizing, which shows subtle attitudes and moods.

To a casual observer visiting the giant panda enclosure at the National Zoo, the interactions ofTian Tian and Mei Xiang look like the behavior of naturally sociable young animals. "They interact at least 50 percent of the time during the day," Brenda Morgan observes. "They play together, and they tend to eat and sleep near each other." The main exception, in the early weeks, has been at night, when the pandas are called by name to separate indoor enclosures. "At 5:00 p.m. they're ready and they don't mind. They know they'll have a meal."

But by the time the keeper opens up the house at 7:00 the next mOl11ing,the pandas are ready to play again. Well- Tian Tian, at any rate, is wide awake and poised for action, pacing briskly, bleating occasionally, munching bamboo. Mei Xiang apparently is not the mOl11ingtype. When the keeper unlocks her enclosure, and lets him in, Tian Tian sometimes tries the gentle approach to get her up. One mOl11inghe finds Mei Xiang, asleep, and rests his upper body on hers until she awakens to play with him. But he might just as easily use a more straightforward method, as he does when he enters her enclosure at 7: 15 on another day, and attempts to rouse Mei Xiang by walking on her. To no avail: she sleeps on.

His routine has come in handy for the keepers, who do not get inside the enclosures with the pandas. "Last Saturday," Morgan recounts, "he was out and she just wouldn't get up. So we let him

in, and he knew what he had to do; he pushed and pushed and pushed until he got her up, and then she was on a roll."

The keepers believe Mei Xiang depends on Tian Tian for more than his alarm clock role. When they first arrived, in particular, she waited for him to go through doors first. Says Morgan, "She would sometimes seem to be saying to him, 'You go check it out.' " Lest Mei Xiang be mistaken for the shrinking violet here, though, there is, as is usual in relationships, another side to this story. One minute they're tussling merrily in their yard; the next she's squealing in annoyance. Tian Tian has gotten the upper hand. "She likes all contact to be on her terms," explains researcher David Powell, who is studying the pair's behavior.

Here the two are, another day, enjoying a treat of carrots. She gobbles hers up, sees that he still has one, and goes over to noisily demand-and get-it. "She'll take his food, and he'll put up with it," Powell says. "He's just happy to be here." So happy that

Feeling right at home, giant pandas Mei Xiang and Tian Tian snooze on their second day at the Smithsonian National Zoo on December 7, 2000.

certain stress-related repetitive behaviors that Tian Tian exhibited in Wolong have almost disappeared. Among them are pawsucking and pirouetting-a combination of placing the front paws against a wall and spinning around.

"The wonderful part," he says, "is that Tian Tian and Mei Xiang get along together, they play wen, and there's nothing aggressive."

"They're both very people-oriented," says Powell. "He's more like a dog, upbeat, mellow, happy to see you, always eager. Mei Xiang is more catlike. Sometimes she expresses interest in you, sometimes not. But they're both just very special, sweet young animals."

Special enough that the Wolong staff was at first reluctant to let them go.

"They're like babies that you've raised from day one," explains Zhang Guiquan, assistant director of Wolong's China Research and Conservation Center for the Giant Panda, who accompanied Mei Xiang and Tian Tian to Washington. "We'd be upset to see any leave, and these two are especially adorable."

Still, how much personality variation can there really be among individual giant pandas? "Quite a lot," answers Zhang, based on his observations at Wolong, which currently has more than 40.

"Just as some people are very shy or introvelied, some pandas are too. Some don't move around much even though they're healthy, and a few choose solitary play." Their mothers' personalities are predictive, he says. "These two are very active and lively and they love to play, and their mothers are very similar."

Personality could playa significant role in their prospects for parenthood. "It all has to do with how easily the animals get into a routine," says Powell. "If they can never adjust, and show all SOlis of stress-related behaviors, it becomes more difficult. The way these two have been so far-laid back, not easily startled or frightened-could be a benefit later, for breeding and rearing

cubs and general health." Mating stakes are high. Females are fertile only once, for a few days, each year, and captive males can be bumbling lovers, if they show amorous intent at all.

Artificial insemination has contributed to many successful captive births.

Mei Xiang and Tian Tian aren't expected to reach sexual maturity for another three years. In the meantime, though, Zoo scientists and keepers are betting that life in a naturalistic setting will both enhance their well-being and ease them into the requisite mood when the time approaches. Friends first, lovers later, researchers reason; but giant pandas also need privacy and time alone, and the new enclosure allows them that space with sectioned telTain. Unlike the grassy and rather bare yard where HsingHsing and Ling-Ling passed their days, Mei Xiang and Tian Tian's well-appointed enclosure is landscaped with their native habitat in mind, from mist and fog-bathed Sichuan species of firs and Chinese red cedars to sand wallows and the cooling grottoes.

Their diet is different too. Whey they arrived, Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing ate rice-based gruel revved up with protein, vitamins and minerals, presented in big metal pans. "That's how they did it in China, so that's how we did it," says National Zoo clinical nutritionist Mary Allen. "But it was messy, and bad for their teeth." Now, keepers distribute little piles of high-fiber leaf-eater biscuits-brimming with essential nutrients that replicate those found in different types of bamboo-in changing locations around the enclosure, making feeding a more complex experience for Mei Xiang and Tian Tian. They still get their bamboo: 40 kilograms a day from a private grove in Maryland.

Mary Allen would like to see the National Zoo start its own bamboo plantation within the next year or so, cultivating four or five species. Researchers will examine how varying nutrient contents stack up against the pandas' own preferences. Beyond

that, some speculate that a diet that's mostly bamboo, instead of other zoo foods, may improve their reproductive chances. "For now, our objective is just to keep them eating the kind they're getting," says Allen.

So far, so good-perhaps not surprising, considering some of the terms ("chowhound," "vacuum cleaner") that crop up to describe this pair, and Tian Tian in particular. "Food-motivated" is the behavioral teml that explains their actions. If bamboo and biscuits are the pandas' daily meat and potatoes, Tian Tian and Mei Xiang are especially motivated by the carrots, boiled yams and, best of all, apples that also come their way from time to time.

Food figures prominently in another new feature of life in the panda enclosure-enrichment sessions, a fairly recent addition to

A tumble in the snow at the Smithsonian National Zoo during the giant pandas 'first us. wintel:

American zoo husbandry in general. Intended to add complexity and diminish monotony in the animals' daily routine through the introduction of novel objects, enrichment sessions also offer some insight into the particular temperament of individual animals.

How long does it take for Tian Tian to approach something unfamiliar? How long will Mei Xiang spend exploring it before wandering off? The two pandas are called indoors while the keepers deposit the novelties outdoors, then they're released into separate yards so they won't unduly influence each other's responses.

On a gray winter aftemoon, the first session kicks off with the appearance of cardboard boxes, filled with hay and studded with biscuits. Tian Tian finds his immediately and proceeds to demolish it, putting his whole body into the effort as he does so.

"Classic bulldozer method," laughs keeper Dianne Mumane.

In less than 20 minutes, he's out of there. No such alacrity for Mei Xiang. She approaches her box tentatively and eventually stalts neatly breaking off little pieces of cardboard. "A princess," Murnane says.

Another day's novelty, discarded Christmas trees, is a snore for both pandas. But pieces of apple and carrot in tubs of water are a hit. Tian Tian barges into his tub, upends it, gobbles all the treats off the ground, while Mei Xiang sits fishing hers out of her tub one by one.

"It's harder to do enrichment with Tian Tian because he's so food-motivated," says Powell. Mei Xiang's special fondness is for scent-all-spice, anise, Wild Musk cologne .... "She responds to everything. Once she rubbed almond extract allover herself and they went to sleep."

Already, their responses to novelty in general and different kinds of enrichment in particular offer soft-focus snapshots of two distinct personalities. As to enlarging the portrait, "it's too early for us to provide scientific documentation on the effects of enrichment on giant pandas," says Benjamin Beck, the National Zoo's associate director for animal programs, "but we wi II be pooling findings with colleagues at Zoo Atlanta and San Diego in the future," and results will be coming in from Wolong, as well.

A larger captive population and increased cooperation among institutions, combined with long duration studies in many areas, may sharpen the picture dramatically. Lucy Spelman takes the long view: "This is an extension of a 28-year commitment at the National Zoo. And it certainly won't stop with this 10-year block of time."

Reintroductions of captive pandas into the wild are one eventual possibility; self-sustaining captive populations, a kind of insurance policy against natural catastrophe, are a much more defined goal. Still, zoos can no longer be thought of simply as arks, Spelman says. "We're looking at research that begins in a captive setting and continues in a wild setting."

Ultimately, the survival of the giant panda as a species will depend on whether that setting stays wild. Spelman ticks off a few roadblocks in what is bound to be a long and painstaking journey. 'We're trying to save a species that lives only on one thing, bamboo. There are a thousand ofthem in a land of 1.2 billion people." The National Zoo, she says, must simultaneously support research, education and conservation.

"It's a now or never situation for the wild giant panda," says Spelman, who traveled to China last spring to visit three of the panda reserves that will receive funding from the loan of Mei Xiang and Tian Tian. For now, though, the plight of the species seems terribly far in time and place from the National Zoo, where a young male panda is spending his afternoon performing countless somersaults and rolls on the slope of his enclosure, a black-and-white ball turning browner by the second.

D About the Author: Leslie Allen regularly Smithsonian magazine.

contributes

articles

to

Lions and Tigers and Bears,

Dh My!

T

The endangered Himalayan red panda is a star of the show at a small but vibrant zoo on the outskirts of California's state capital, Sacramento

he little red panda, its fluffy tail ringed like a raccoon's, peers at us from a branch before it nimbly leaps away to play with its cronies. He looks at ease in the Red Panda Forest, a mixed species habitat for the endangered red panda and Asian bird, fish and turtle species at the Sacramento Zoo. Completed in 2000, the red panda habitat exemplifies a new trend in zoo management.

Zookeepers, architects and horticulturists synthesized their skills to create a place where diverse animals can thrive in an environment approximating their jungle home. And thrive they do: the red panda breeding pair allotted to the zoo produced two cubs in June 2001.

A little further down the path, a paw and tail dangle from a gray stone shelfthe only sign of the snow leopard lounging inside his rocky niche, out of the hot sun. He is a resident of the Rare Feline Center, another exhibit area that was developed in the past decade at this small city zoo. The sensitive Clouded Leopard has been taken off exhibit for a needed rest. But nervous hyenas run back and forth, looking for their main chance.

Their big cat neighbor, John, the lordly lion, yawns and stretches in front of his cave-like den-bored, no doubt, by the never-ending flow of human gawkers.

Lean cheetahs run graceful laps around their compound. It's not the African veldt, but they still have room to stretch their legs. Located near the city limits of Sacramento, California, the zoo is worlds away from surrounding suburbia.

This year, as the Sacramento Zoo celebrates its 75th anniversary, it also celebrates changes in zoo keeping practices that have brought even small zoos like this one out of the dark ages of caged captivity. It began life in 1927 as the William Land Park Zoo, a 1.7-hectare establishment that housed about 40 small animals, a "little zoo in the park." In the 1960s more land was acquired, and it was enlarged to the current 5.8 hectares.

Since the 1980s zoos have moved away

from iron bars and cement cells toward for the inmates. more natural habitats Some large zoos, such as the San Diego Zoo, operate huge wildlife parks in which animals can run in relative freedom during the day, while visitors observe them from jeeps or zoo trains, as if on safari.

But small can be beautiful, too, as the Sacramento Zoo demonstrates.

California's rich soil blesses the grounds with lavish verdure. Old, stately black oaks that are native to the area remain well preserved. Today the zoo shelters more than a hundred different species, many endangered. Because space is restricted, smaller animals predominate.

There is a good selection of cats, including jaguars and a Sumatran Tiger. Primates are well represented by mangabeys,

chimpanzees, several types

golden-bellied of lemurs and

Sumatran orangutans, among others. One orangutan-the zoo poster boy-rejoices in the somewhat tongue-in-cheek name

"Urban."

Ungulates, birds, reptiles and amphibians coexist happily. There are even some winged wild visitors. This part of California once held extensive wetlands that attracted abundant bird life.

The lake inside the zoo still draws mallard and wood ducks.

For homo sapiens, apt to tire from long perambulations, it is a manageable zoo. In under two hours you can enjoy strolling through a zoo that effectively accomplishes, in a nutshell, what the best American zoos today endeavor to achieve: conservation, education and recreation.

After helping to transfer some squealing lemurs to portable cages and onto golf carts for their ride to the veterinary hospital, zookeeper Leslie Fields has a few minutes to talk. Fields is the lead mammal keeper and is a specialist in mangabeys, an endangered African primate. We sit at one of the tables in the open space outside the zoo's outdoor cafe. A group of

docents, or volunteers,

gather nearby for a meeting over coffee and croissants.

The docents, many of them retired senior citizens, are important figures in the American zoo landscape these days. They help as guides and educators, and they free professionals like Leslie Fields to focus on the work of better zookeeping.

And according to Fields, a 20-year zoo management veteran, zookeeping is getting better all the time. "I think what's happened is that we went from having people

just cleaning and feeding animals, to people who knew a lot of science. That was a big benefit. And now people are looking at a bigger picture," she says. That means "understanding from a science background what the natural behavior of that of individuals, species is, the psychology and then going further and asking what are the dynamics happening in this exhibit." The goal is to provide animals with a better quality

of life, whether

it is expert

Views on Indian Zoos

W

~ ~ ~ ~

8 ~ I[

Above: The large tiger enclave at the Arignar Anna Zoo, Chennai. It is considered one of India:SO best. Below: The habitat for the Nilgiri langurs, also at Arignar Anna Zoo.

hile some animal rights campaigners-PETA and Born Free, among them-militate against zoos for being cruel torture chambers for animals, those who work in the zoo field disagree. Zoo professionals see a big difference between ill-kept prisons where animals are mistreated or simply neglected and the modern zoo, where animals are conserved, cared for and studied. Information thus gleaned can help animals in the wild. Breeding programs-another hotly debated issue in wildlife conservation circles-could well be the salvation of species which are becoming extinct in their natural habitats. The benefits of scientific, humane zoo management are now recognized throughout the world, as more countries implement better standards for their zoos.

Sally Walker, an American conservationist, comes down firmly on the side of zoos. She has been involved with Indian zoos for 18 years. She originally came to India to study Sanskrit and yoga, but when she fell in love with some rejected tiger cubs during a chance visit to the Mysore Zoo, she found her calling. The Zoo Outreach Organisation (ZOO) grew out of the Friends of Mysore Zoo, a group she started with the blessing of the Zoo Authority of Karnataka in 1982. The "friends of zoos" concept is a keystone of support for many fine zoos in the United States. These groups educate, advocate and fund raise to improve zoo quality. Most good zoos in the United States have significant sponsorship

from private donors, and although part of that may come from large corporate donations, a substantial amount comes from memberships in affiliated zoo societies.

"Zoo Outreach Organisation promoted the concept of volunteers and NGOs working with zoos and set the tone by trying to do things that would help zoos instead of merely being critical," Walker says. It also provided a platform for education about zoos and animals, and resources for developing standards for Indian zoos. ZOO publishes a magazine, ZOOS' PRINT, which is geared toward zoo professionals in India. It addresses zookeeping, conservation and veterinary concerns, as well as information about international resources and links to international zoo organizations like the American, European and World Aquarium and .Zoo Associations (AZA, EAZA and WAZA).

"Scientifically managed zoos offer ways and means of finding solutions to some of the problems confronting wildlife today," Walker maintains. With increased habitat destruction, some species are doomed. "Zoos give wild animals with no chance a last chance." India, with hundreds of rare and exotic animal species-a significant number of which are endangered-has an excellent opportunity to conserve these species close to home, not only in its national wildlife parks but in its zoos.

In the late 1970s and '80s, many new zoos were established in India and norms were discussed. At that time the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service evaluated five

veterinary

care, proper

diet, comfortable

living arrangements or social interaction with animal peers. All these factors are necessary for an animal's physical and mental health.

Unlike the larger zoos where staff tends to be more hierarchical, a small zoo allows keepers more hands-on involvement. Their input counts. Fields tells a story about how keepers took direct action to change an exhibit the zoo couldn't afford to reconstruct.

"If you had the money and the bulldozer it would be better to knock down these old things from the 1960s~then state-of-the-art but now awful."

Pointing to a row of exhibits "which we would love to destroy," she says, "the keepers filled it in with dirt and plants and made a lot of hidey spots for these cats who really appreciate the decrease of stress levels." If there is no money, she says, "It's a matter of looking at what you have, and in-house you can

do something

about it."

Celsius

in the summer.

Furry

creatures

Zoo habitat construction is an expensive, multifaceted undertaking.

These days it requires understanding of animal behavior, according to Fields. Animals need stress-reducing spots~"hidey holes"~

suited for high Himalayan coolness like the red pandas must be accommodated, and so they are, even in this small zoo.

When the mercury rises, they can retire to air conditioned enclosures.

This is a

where they can get away from the public or each other. A species may be semi-terrestrial, but in nature that would actually mean 15 meters up in the air much of the time. In the limited space of a small zoo, taking this into account is critical. "Our

requirement for certain delicate species according to guidelines set down by the American Zoo and Aquarium Association (AZA). One reason the good zoos in America are so good is their voluntary

chimp exhibit is a pretty good example," Fields explains. "It was built 15 years ago on the site of two old, cement, ape grottoes. So we were confined to that small space. But what we did was go up, and make it so that the chimps use that space, and they use every single square inch. We have a 53-year-old chimp in there who is in fabulous condition."

It gets hot in Sacramento.

Temperatures often soar above 42 degrees

important Indian zoos, and a report compiled by Dave Ferguson-who has devoted much of his career to Indian wildlife-contributed to the development of conservation strategies. Thanks to committed individuals who shepherded standard-setting legislation and fought for zoo improvement-Sally Walker and ZOO were among the strong lobbyists-the Central Zoo Authority (CZA) was set up in 1992 by an act of Parliament.

P.R. Sinha, CZA director, says its purpose "is to phase out the bad zoos, so that resources are channelized for the improvement of the zoos." And in this he feels they have been successful. In less than a decade, CZA has made headway on several fronts. Most zoos are under state jurisdiction, so CZA courts state government officials for support.

CZA has defined guidelines for accreditation of zoos. Zoos are inspected, given time to meet the requirements, and if they do so, they are given official recognition by the CZA. These zoos are reviewed every two years by a team composed of an experienced zoo director and a wildlife veterinarian. The CZA also lends financial assistance. "There has been qualitative change in that people are aware of regulations and responsibilities," Sinha says. While he didn't want to rank zoos, he did say that zoos located in South India tend to have good management practices. "Hyderabad zoo continues to be one of the finest zoos.

Tirupati is excellent in design, a very modern zoo-designing concept."

One success story where a zoo has been transformed, he says, is in Gwalior. It has become a conservation zoo for Satpura National Park in Madhya Pradesh.

Naturally, there are constraints. Funds are always ShOl1. A lack of trained personnel in zoos is another hurdle, but CZA is rectifYing this situation with "capacity building." According to Bipul Chakrabm1y, a CZA scientist, the Indian Veterinary Research Institute in Izzatnagar, Uttar Pradesh, now offers a nine-month course in wildlife veterinary medicine,

adherence to these guidelines, called Species Survival Plans (SSP). Originally the SSPs applied primarily to endangered animals such as the tiger, but now these guidelines have been adopted as a standard for good zoo management.

AZA is a nongovernmental organization which inspects and certifies zoos for accreditation.

To qualify, a zoo must maintain certain standards of veterinary care, education, conservation, ethics and so forth.

Accredited zoos are re-

and postgraduate programs are on the curricula at some veterinary schools. College students interested in zoo science are accepted as volunteer interns at certain zoos. The Delhi Zoo has such a program. Where once a qualified vet at a zoo was the exception, CZA hopes to make it the rule. With more scientifically-qualified staff, more breeding programs can be instituted. Right now the only zoo with research facilities approved by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) is the Padmaja Naidu Himalayan Zoological Park in Darjeeling, where red pandas and snow leopards are bred. Chakrabarty says ideally more breeding zoos will comply with DST guidelines. Currently Dmjeeling has 22 red pandas, and ways and means of reintroducing these animals into the wild are being discussed.

In India, with its wealth of wildlife, conservation is a priority. Ashok Kumar, trustee of Wildlife Trust oflndia, feels strongly about appropriately-trained personnel. "Forest officers should not be placed in zoos unless they take specialized training. It's a completely different kind of animal management." He adds, "Zoos should be for conservation, education, breeding and reintroducing animals into the wild." He points out that not all animals bred in captivity can be successfully reintroduced, but those that can, should be. Chakrabarty adds, "Percolation of ideas is slow, partly because of the shol1 term managers serve. They get to know the job and then are transferred." tie says CZA hopes to institute a mandatory, five-year minimum term so that officers can initiate and even see some projects through.

Another recent, positive development encouraged by CZA is the sponsorship of zoo exhibits by the corporate sector. Sahara India has adopted an exhibit at the Lucknow zoo. This kind of underwriting speeds up zoo modernization and puts the development of state-of-the-art facilities in the realm of the possible.

S

ince 1981 the American Zoo and Aquarium Association (AZA) has administered the Species Survival Plan, a cooperative population management and conservation program for selected species in zoos and aquariums. The goal is to maintain a healthy and self-sustaining population. Currently there are 102 SSPs which cover 145 individual species in the 200 AZA-accredited zoos in NOIih America. The aims and method of the Species Survival Plan are to: • Organize scientifically-controlled managed breeding programs for selected wildlife as a hedge against extinction.

• Cooperate with other institutions and agencies to ensure integrated conservation strategies.

•

Increase public awareness of wildlife conservation issues, including development and implementation of education strategies at AZA-member institutions and in the field.

Conduct basic and applied research to contribute to our knowledge of various species.

Train wildlife and zoo professionals.

Develop and test various technologies relevant to field conservation.

Reintroduce captive-bred wildlife into restored or secure habitat as appropriate and necessary.

• • • •

More information about animal conservation in zoos and the wilderness can be found on the Internet. Web sites to check out: American Zoo and Aquarium Association <www.aza.org> American Association of Zoo Keepers <www.aazk.org> Smithsonian National Zoological Park <www.natzoo.si.edu> Links to U.S. zoos and animal-related sites <WWW.zoo.com> Zoo lex <www.zoolex.org> provides information on zoo design, news and research India specific: Central Zoo Authority <envforlnic.in/cza/> Wildlife Institute of India <www.wii.gov.in> Zoo Outreach Organisation <www.zooreach.org>

evaluated every five years. The U.S. Department of Agriculture also periodically inspects bona fide zoos. Legislation is another factor in good zookeeping.

California has some of the toughest animal protection laws and laws against illegal breeding. Other states are not so strict, and underground trade in breeding and auctioning of animals does exist. The roadside zoos encountered along the highways in Florida, for instance, are not usually inspected, and sometimes are fronts for illegal trade in animals.

E

thics inside and outside the zoo are a concern of zoo professionals, and are discussed in the zoo's educational outreach programs. Leslie Fields, who often gives talks to community groups, says, "We like to see people with ethics about pets. We don't like to see people with tigers in their backyards in

Texas. We don't like to see a capuchin on somebody's shoulder going through Sunrise Mall here. They don't have a place here. They are not in their social groups, added to that is the risk of disease transmission between humans and primates." Within the zoo, humane treatment of animals, consideration for their natural habits, is paramount. Shelter, feeding routines that give animals choices, appropriate interaction with other animals, stress reduction, and medical care are all important elements. Visitors are taught how to behave in the zoo: not to tease or throw things at animals, but to treat them with respect. Education is a component of the zoo, conferred not only by the animals themselves, but by zoo features such as the "Discovery Room."

Informative docents move around the zoo with carts displaying a variety of antlers, pelts or characteristic pug and

hoof marks for VISItors to examine in proximity to the living animals. There is also a mobile zoo that takes animals on tour. Bobcats-a California nativehedgehogs, birds, tortoises, geckos and snakes are ferried to schools and recreational centers in the locality so children can get up close and personal, to better appreciate wildlife. Slide shows, lectures and written material supplement these outings, which emphasize conservation.

Big zoos with large endowments have outreach programs that extend far beyond domestic endangered species. The Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington, D.C., or the San Diego Zoo, for instance-sometimes in coordination with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service-do important field research on breeding and conservation of endangered species all over the world.

This research is then shared with colleagues in zoos internationally. Animal treatment in zoos is increasingly based upon observation in the wild.

Networking is an impoliant aspect of zookeeping in America. The AZA is at the center of this, as is the Association of American Zoo Keepers. They swap information and maintain specialized committees focused on various animal species.

They help orchestrate transfers of animals from one zoo to another. When there is a crisis, funds can be raised. Recently, about $400,000 in private donations were raised spontaneously after appeals to restore and send a team to treat animals at the Kabul Zoo. Reaching out, spreading good news, and sharing techniques are part of the zookeeper's commitment, Leslie Fields-who also coordinates the AZA Species Survival Plan for mangabeys-emphasizes.

"Very international stuff is starting to happen," she says, as zoos in different countries institute stricter accreditation procedures and start coming up to acceptable standards. "It's a very good thing," she adds. "We don't want to live here in the little Sacramento Zoo, a little world, and just go along. We want to also have an impact out in the world, because that's where all these guys"-she gestures toward the animals nearby"came from, way back when."

D

BUSINESS

AT WORK

IT ALL STARTEO INNOCUOUSLY ENOU6H ...

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Copyright © The New Yorker Collection 200 I Danny Shanahan from CaJ1oonbank.com. All rights reserved.

JUST WHE.N THE DARk 511)£.

OF' CONSUMf.~ISMT~~£ATENS TO [)RIVE.HIM ovtR THE EDGE. AN ANGEl. APPEARS [

"I love the ephemeral nature of live theatre. Once a specific pelformance is ovel; you can never be subjected to it again. " Copyright ~ The New Yorker Collection 2001 William Hacreli rrom Cartoonbank.com. All rights reserved.

Copyright ~ 2000 Ted Rail. All rights reserved.

Originally appeared in Fortune, June 26, 2000.

e travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves.

We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again-to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more. The beauty of this whole process was best described, perhaps, before people even took to frequent flying, by George Santayana in his lapidary essay, "The Philosophy of Travel." We "need sometimes," the Harvard philosopher wrote, "to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what."

I like that stress on work, since never more than on the road are we shown how propotiional our blessings are to the difficulty that precedes them; and I like the stress on a holiday that's "moral" since we fall into our ethical habits as easily as into our beds at night. Few of us ever forget the connection between "travel" and "travail," and I know that I travel in large part in search of hardship-both my own, which I want to feel, and others', which I need to see. Travel in that sense guides us toward a better balance of wisdom and compassion-of seeing the world clearly, and yet feeling it truly. For seeing without feeling can obviously be uncaring; while feeling without seeing can be blind.

Yet for me the first great joy of traveling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and cetiainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle. In that regard, even a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet (in Beijing) or a scratchy revival showing of Wild Orchids (on the ChampsElysees) can be both novelty and revelation: In China, after all, people will pay a

It whirls you around, turns you upside down and stands everything you took for granted on its head

whole week's wages to eat with Colonel Sanders, and in Paris, Mickey Rourke is regarded as the greatest actor since Jerry Lewis.

If a Mongolian restaurant seems exotic to us in Evanston, lllinois, it only follows that a McDonald's would seem equally exotic in Ulan Bator-or, at least, equally far from everything expected. Though it's fashionable nowadays to draw a distinction between the "tourist" and the "traveler," perhaps the real distinction lies between those who leave their assumptions at home, and those who don't: Among those who don't, a tourist is just someone who complains, "Nothing here is the way it is at home," while a traveler is one who grumbles, "Everything here is the same as it is in Cairo-or Cuzco or Kathmandu." It's all very much the same.

But for the rest of us, the sovereign freedom of traveling comes from the fact that it whirls you around and turns you upside down, and stands everything you took for granted on its head. If a diploma can famously be a passport (to a journey tlu'ough hard realism), a passport can be a diploma (for a crash course in cultural relativism). And the first lesson we learn on the road, whether we like it or not, is how provisional and provincial are the things we imagine to be universal. When you go to orth Korea, for example, you really do feel as if you've landed on a different planet-and the North Koreans doubtless feel that they're being visited by an extratelTestrial, too (or else they simply assume that you, as they do, receive orders every morning from the Central Committee on what clothes to wear and what route to use when walking to work, and you, as they do, have loudspeakers in your bedroom broadcasting propaganda every morning at dawn, and you, as they do, have your radios fixed so as to receive only a single channel).

We travel, then, in part just to shake up our complacencies by seeing all the moral and political urgencies, the life-and-death dilemmas, that we seldom have to face at home. And we travel to fill in the gaps left by tomolTOW'Sheadlines: When you drive down the streets of Port-au-Prince, for

example, where there is almost no paving and women relieve themselves next to mountains of trash, your notions of the Internet and a "one world order" grow usefully revised. Travel is the best way we have of rescuing the humanity of places, and saving them from abstraction and ideology.

And in the process, we also get saved from abstraction ourselves, and come to see how much we can bring to the places we visit, and how much we can become a kind of carrier pigeon-an anti-Federal Express, if you like-in transporting back and fOl1h what every culture needs. I find that I always take Michael Jordan posters to Kyoto, and bring woven ikebana baskets back to California; I invariably travel to Cuba with a suitcase piled high with bottles of Tylenol and bars of soap, and come back with one piled high with salsa tapes, and hopes, and letters to long-lost brothers.

But more significantly, we can)! values and beliefs and news to the places we go, and in many pal1s of the world, we become walking video screens and living newspapers, the only channels that can take people out of the censored limits of their homelands. In closed or impoverished places, like Pagan or Lhasa or Havana, we are the eyes and ears of the people we meet, their only contact with the world outside and, very often, the closest, quite literally, they will ever come to Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton. Not the least of the challenges of travel, therefore, is learning how to import-and expol1dreams with tenderness.

By now all of us have heard (too often) the old Proust line about how the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new places but in seeing with new eyes.

Yet one of the subtler beauties of travel is that it enables you to bring new eyes to the people you encounter. Thus even as holidays help you appreciate your own home more-not least by seeing it through a distant admirer's eyes-they help you bring newly appreciative-distant-eyes to the places you visit. You can teach them what they have to celebrate as much as you celebrate what they have to teach. This, I think, is how tourism, which so obviously destroys cultures, can also resuscitate or revive them, how it has created new "tra-

ditional" dances in Bali, and caused craftsmen in India to pay new attention to their works. If the first thing we can bring the Cubans is a real and balanced sense of what contemporary America is like, the second-and perhaps more important -thing we can bring them is a fresh and renewed sense of how special are the warmth and beauty of their countl)!, for those who can compare it with other places around the globe.

Thus travel spins us round in two ways at once: It shows us the sights and values and issues that we might ordinarily ignore; but it also, and more deeply, shows us all the pal1s of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty. For in traveling to a truly foreign place, we inevitably travel to moods and states of mind and hidden inward passages that we'd otherwise seldom have cause to visit.

On the most basic level, when I'm in Thailand, though a teetotaler who usually goes to bed at 9 p.m., I stay up till dawn in the local bars; and in Tibet, though not a real Buddhist, I spend days on end in temples, listening to the chants of sutras. I go to Iceland to visit the lunar spaces within me, and, in the uncanny quietude and emptiness of that vast and treeless world, to tap pal1s of myself generally obscured by chatter and routine. e travel, then, in search of both self and anonymity-and, of course, in finding the one we apprehend the other. Abroad, we are wonderfully free of caste and job and standing; we are, as Hazlitt puts it, just the "gentlemen in the parlour," and people cannot put a name or tag to us. And precisely because we are clarified in this way, and freed of inessential labels, we have the oppoliunity to come into contact with more essential palis of ourselves (which may begin to explain why we may feel most alive when far from home).

Abroad is the place where we stay up late, follow impulse and find ourselves as wide open as when we are in love. We live without a past or future, for a moment at least, and are ourselves up for grabs and open to interpretation.

We even may

become mysterious-to others, at first, and sometimes to ourselves-and, as no less a dignitary than Oliver Cromwell once noted, "A man never goes so far as when he doesn't know where he is going."

There are, of course, great dangers to this, as to eVel)! kind of freedom, but the great promise of it is that, traveling, we are born again, and able to return at moments to a younger and a more open kind of self.

Traveling is a way to reverse time, to a small extent, and make a day last a year-or at least 45 hours-and traveling is an easy way of sUlTounding ourselves, as in childhood, with what we cannot understand.

Language facilitates this cracking open, for when we go to France, we often migrate to French, and the more childlike self, simple and polite, that speaking a foreign language educes. Even when I'm not speaking pidgin English in Hanoi, I'm simplified in a positive way, and concerned not with expressing myself, but simply making sense.

So travel, for many of us, is a quest for not just the unknown, but the unknowing; I, at least, travel in search of an innocent eye that can return me to a more innocent self. I tend to believe more abroad than I do at home (which, though treacherous again, can at least help me to extend my vision), and I tend to be more easily excited abroad, and even kinder. And since no one I meet can "place" me-no one can fix me in my resume-I can remake myself for better, as well as, of course, for worse (if travel is notoriously a cradle for false identities, it can also, at its best, be a crucible for truer ones). In this way, travel can be a kind of monasticism on the move: On the road, we often live more simply (even when staying in a lUXUl)!hotel), with no more possessions than we can can)!, and sUlTendering ourselves to chance.

This is what Camus meant when he said that "what gives value to travel is fear"-disruption, in other words, (or emancipation) from circumstance, and all the habits behind which we hide. And that is why many of us travel not in search of answers, but of better questions. I, like many people, tend to ask questions of the places I visit, and relish most the ones that ask the most searching questions back of me: In Paraguay, for example, where one

car in every two is stolen, and two-thirds of the goods on sale are smuggled, [ have to rethink my every Californian assumption. And in Thailand, where many young women give up their bodies in order to protect their families-to become better Buddhists-I have to question my own too-ready judgments. "The ideal travel book," Christopher Isherwood once said, "should be perhaps a little like a crime story in which you're in search of something." And it's the best kind of something, I would add, if it's one that you can never quite find.

I remember, in fact, after my first trips to Southeast Asia, more than a decade ago, how [ would come back to my apartment in New York, and lie in my bed, kept up by something more than jet lag, playing back, in my memory, over and over, all that I had experienced, and paging wistfully through my photographs and reading and re-reading my diaries, as if to extract some mystery from them. Anyone witnessing this strange scene would have drawn the right conclusion: I was in love.

For if evelY true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can't quite speak the language, and you don't know where you're going, and you're pulled ever deeper into the inviting darkness, evelY trip to a foreign countly can be a love affair, where you're left puzzling over who you are and whom you've fallen in love with. All the great travel books are love stories, by some reckoning-from the Odyssey and the Aeneid to the Divine Comedy and the New Testament-and all good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.

And what this metaphor also brings home to us is that all travel is a two-way transaction, as we too easily forget, and if warfare is one model of the meeting of nations, romance is another. For what we all too often ignore when we go abroad is that we are objects of scrutiny as much as the people we scrutinize, and we are being consumed by the cultures we consume, as much on the road as when we are at home. At the velY least, we are objects of speculation (and even desire) who can seem as exotic to the people around us as they do to us.

We are the comic props in Japanese

home-movies, the oddities in Maliese anecdotes and the fall-guys in Chinese jokes; we are the moving postcards or bizarre objets trouves that villagers in Peru will later tell their friends about. If travel is about the meeting of realities, it is no less about the mating of illusions: You give me my dreamed-of vision of Tibet, and I'll give you your wished-for California. And in truth, many of us, even (or especially) the ones who are fleeing America abroad, will get taken, willy-nilly, as symbols of the American Dream. hat, in fact, is perhaps the most central and most ,. wrenching of the questions travel proposes to us: how to respond to the dream that people tender to you? Do you encourage their notions of a Land of Milk and Honey across the horizon, even if it is the same land you've abandoned? Or do you tlY to dampen their enthusiasm for a place that exists only in the mind? To quicken their dreams may, after all, be to match-make them with an illusion; yet to dash them may be to strip them of the one possession that sustains them in adversity.

That whole complex interaction-not unlike the dilemmas we face with those we love (how do we balance truthfulness and tact?)-is partly the reason why so many of the great travel writers, by nature, are enthusiasts: not just Pierre Loti, who famously, infamously, fell in love wherever he alighted (an archetypal sailor leaving offspring in the form of Madame Butterfly myths), but also Hemy Miller, D.H. Lawrence or Graham Greene, all of whom bore out the hidden truth that we are optimists abroad as readily as pessimists as home. None of them was by any means blind to the deficiencies of the places around them, but all, having chosen to go there, chose to find something to admire.

All, in that sense, believed in "being moved" as one of the points of taking trips, and "being transpolied" by private as well as public means; all saw that "ecstasy" ("ex-stasis") tells us that our highest moments come when we're not stationary, and that epiphany can follow movement as much as it precipitates it. [ remember once

asking the great travel writer Norman Lewis ifhe'd ever be interested in writing on apmiheid South Africa. He looked at me astonished. "To write well about a thing," he said, "I've got to like it!"

At the same time, as all this is intrinsic to travel, from Ovid to O'Rourke, travel itself is changing as the world does, and with it, the mandate of the travel writer.

It's not enough to go to the ends of the earth these days (not least because the ends of the earth are often coming to you); and where a writer like Jan Morris could, a few years ago, achieve something miraculous simply by voyaging to all the great cities of the globe, now anyone with a Visa card can do that. So where Morris, in effect, was chronicling the last days of the Empire, a younger travel writer is in a better position to chart the first days of a new Empire, postnational, global, mobile and yet as diligent as the Raj in transpOliing its props and its values around the world.

In the mid-19th century, the British famously sent the Bible and Shakespeare and cricket round the world; now a more international kind of Empire is sending Madonna and the Simpsons and Brad Pitt.

And the way in which each culture takes in this common pool of references tells you as much about them as their indigenous products might. Madonna in an Islamic country, after all, sounds radically different from Madonna in a Confucian one, and neither begins to mean the same as Madonna on East 14th Street. When you go to a McDonald's outlet in Kyoto, you will find Teriyaki McBurgers and Bacon Potato Pies. The placemats offer maps of the great temples of the city, and the posters all around broadcast the wonders of San Francisco. And-most crucial of all-the young people eating their Big Macs, with baseball caps worn backwards, and tight 501 jeans, are still utterly and inalienably Japanese in the way they move, they nod, they sip their Oolong teas-and never to be mistaken for the patrons of a McDonald's outlet in Rio, Morocco or Managua. These days a whole new realm of exotica arises out of the way one culture colors and appropriates the products of another.

The other factor complicating and excit-

ing all of this is people, who are, more and more, themselves as many-tongued and mongrel as cities like Sydney or Toronto or Hong Kong. I am, in many ways, an increasingly typical specimen, if only because I was born, as the son of Indian parents, in England, moved to America at 7 and cannot really call myself an Indian, an American or an Englishman. I was, in ShOl1, a traveler at bil1h, for whom even a visit to the candy store was a trip through a foreign world where no one I saw quite matched my parents' inheritance, or my own. And though some of this is involuntary and tragic-the number of refugees in the world, which came to just 2.5 million in 1970, is now at least 27.4 million-it does involve, for some of us, the chance to be transnational in a happier sense, able to adapt anywhere, used to being outsiders everywhere and forced to fashion our own rigorous sense of home. (And if nowhere is quite home, we can be optimists everywhere.) esides, even those who don't move around the world find the world moving more and more around them. Walk just six blocks, in Queens or Berkeley, and you're traveling through several cultures in as many minutes; get into a cab outside the White House, and you're often in a piece of Addis Ababa. And technology, too, compounds this (sometimes deceptive) sense of availability, so that many people feel they can travel around the world without leaving the room- through cyberspace or CD-ROMs, videos and virtual travel. There are many challenges in this, of course, in what it says about essential notions of family and community and loyalty, and in the wony that air-conditioned, purely synthetic versions of places may replace the real thing-not to mention the fact that the world seems increasingly in flux, a moving target quicker than our notions of it. But there is, for the traveler at least, the sense that learning about home and learning about a foreign world can be one and the same thing.

All of us feel this from the cradle, and know, in some sense, that all the significant movement we ever take is internal.

We travel when we see a movie, strike up a new friendship, get held up. Novels are

B

often journeys as much as travel books are fictions; and though this has been true since at least as long ago as Sir John Mandeville's colorful 14th century accounts of a Far East he'd never visited, it's an even more shadowy distinction now, as genre distinctions join other borders in collapsing.

In Mary Morris's House Arrest, a thinly disguised account of Castro's Cuba, the novelist reiterates, on the copyright page, "All dialogue is invented. Isabella, her family, the inhabitants and even la isla itself are creations of the author's imagination." On page 172, however, we read, "La isla, of course, does exist. Don't let anyone fool you about that. It just feels as if it doesn't. But it does." No wonder the travel-writer narrator-a fictional construct (or not)?-confesses to devoting her travel magazine column to places that never existed. "Erewhon," after all, the undiscovered land in Samuel Butler's great travel novel, is just "nowhere" rearranged.

Travel, then, is a voyage into that famously subjective zone, the imagination, and what the traveler brings back is-and has to be-an ineffable compound of himself and the place, what's really there and what's only in him. Thus Bruce Chatwin's books seem to dance around the distinction between fact and fancy. V.S. Naipaul's recent book, A Way in the World, was published as a non-fictional "series" in England and a "novel" in the United States. And when some of the stories in Paul Theroux's half-invented memoir, My Other Life, were published in The New Yorker, they were slyly categorized as "Fact and Fiction."

And since travel is, in a sense, about the conspiracy of perception and imagination, the two great travel writers, for me, to whom 1 constantly return are Emerson and Thoreau (the one who famously advised that "travel ing is a fool's paradise," and the other who "traveled a good deal in Concord"). Both of them insist on the fact that reality is our creation, and that we invent the places we see as much as we do the books that we read. What we find outside ourselves has to be inside ourselves for us to find it. Or, as Sir Thomas Browne sagely put it, "We carry within us the won-

ders we seek without us. There is Africa and her prodigies in us."

So, if more and more of us have to can'y our sense of home inside us, we also -Emerson and Thoreau remind us-have to carry with us our sense of destination.

The most valuable Pacifics we explore will always be the vast expanses within us, and the most imp011ant orthwest Crossings the thresholds we cross in the heart.

The vi11ue of finding a gilded pavilion in Kyoto is that it allows you to take back a more lasting, private Golden Temple to your office in Rockefeller Center.

And even as the world seems to grow more exhausted, our travels do not, and some of the finest travel books in recent years have been those that undertake a parallel journey, matching the physical steps of a pilgrimage with the metaphysical steps of a questioning (as in Peter Matthiessen's great The Snow Leopard), or chronicling a trip to the f311hest reaches of human strangeness (as in Oliver Sack's Island a/the Color-Blind, which features a journey not just to a remote atoll in the Pacific, but to a realm where people actually see light differently). The most distant shores, we are constantly reminded, lie within the person asleep at our side.

So travel, at heal1, is just a quick way to keeping our minds mobile and awake. As Santayana, the heir to Emerson and Thoreau with whom 1 began, wrote, "There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar; it keeps the mind nimble; it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor." Romantic poets inaugurated an era of travel because they were the great apostles of open eyes.

Buddhist monks are often vagabonds, in part because they believe in wakefulness.

And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it's a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.

D About the Author: Pico lyer is a contributing editor o/Salon Travel & Food. His new book is The Global Soul. He is also the author 0/ Video Nights in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, Falling off the Map, Cuba and the Night and Tropical Classical.

Andy Grove's

Rational Exuberance could say that the phrase "new economy" doesn't sit well with Andy Grove-if by "doesn't sit well" you mean it drives him slightly batty. Mention it in conversation and Intel's chair emits a low groan, screws up his face, then scrapes his fingers down an imaginary chalkboard. Ask him what the problem is and he answers with a growl: "What the hell is new about it?" Press a little further, though, and you'll find that while Grove objects to the new economy's nomenclature, he actually believes passionately in most of its principles. He grumbles and he quibbles, but the truth is inescapable: Andy Grove remains an Internet bull.

It doesn't come naturally. In his four decades in Silicon Valley, Grove has earned renown as a scientist and a strategist, an operations wizard and a management guru, an empire builder and a captain of industry. But to each of these divergent roles, Grove has brought two common qualities: the self-advertised paranoia for which he's famous and a skepticism so thorough and withering it stings.

Averse to cant, allergic to hype, he has a hard mind and a cold eye and zero tolerance for bullshit-even when bullshit would play to his advantage. In an industry where the honorific "visionary" is applied as liberally as lip gloss

Y

OU

in Hollywood, Grove resolutely refuses the label. Once, we were talking about Intel's invention of the microprocessor in 1971, and I noted that Grove's mentor, Gordon Moore, had described it at the time as "one of the most revolutionary products in the history of mankind."

Lobbing a blimp-sized softball of a question, I asked Grove ifhe'd seen the chip's potential with equal clarity.

"I didn't," he replied without a ~ moment's hesitation. "I was running an assembly line designed to build memory 8 chips. I saw the microprocessor as a bloody nuisance."

Given all this, it's not too surprising that Grove greeted many of the Internet boom's most cherished nostrums with nothing but disdain. The notion that the business cycle had been repealed, say.

Or that companies could postpone making profits indefinitely. Or that the Nasdaq could continue to march forever upward. All through the boom, every time the stock market shuddered, Grove could be heard telling anyone in earshot, "This is it, the day of reckoning is at hand-the info-Gotterdammerung."

He said that a lot. For three solid years. And

E

every time he said it, the prediction proved premature. Until, of course, it finally came true.

Yet for all Grove's doomsaying, he never imagined that the reversal of fortune would be so vicious--Qr that it would hit his own firm so hard. Even before the asdaq correction began to look more like a meltdown, Intel had been stumbling through an unusually rough patch. In 2000, the company was plagued by the kind of basic execution errors (product shortages, delays, even cancellations) it had long been famous for avoiding. At the same time, with its mainline microprocessor business facing an unin-

a college professor, and a good one, presenting his arguments with clarity, force, and the aid of vivid metaphors. (Indeed, Grove has always nurtured a passion for pedagogy, having taught courses over the years at Stanford, at Berkeley, and inhouse at Intel.)

Where popular attitudes toward the Internet tend to be maddeningly bipolar-either the Net changes everything or the Net changes nothing-Grove's views emanate from the radical center. In our conversations, he contended that the Internet's adolescence would be every bit as transfiguring as its splashy infancy, unleashing new kinds of power inside corporations and propelling globalization to an unprecedented then degree; he even heaped praise on several prominent dotcoms. He in terms spoke with candor and insight about the wrenching transition Now, I'm Intel is undergoing, as it seeks to than the market is. reinvent itself for an age in which the PC is just one device in a rapidly expanding universe of computing. And he commented poignantly, though never sentimentally, on his own career and legacy in Silicon Valley.

At this moment of great confusion and uncertainty in high tech, Grove is a figure in much demand. People want answers; they assume he has them. And he does-though they aren't the simple, sloganeering kind that gained easy currency in rosier times.

Instead, Grove's answers are rigorous, nuanced, and forthright.

Just like him. As one ofthe few remaining leaders who were present at the creation, he hasn't just seen it all before: He's seen worse. Fortunately for us, he's still looking toward the future.

I was behind the market, I was even with it, then

I fell behind again of my sense of the Internet's potential. probably

more optimistic

spiring future of slow growth and price wars, Intel was venturing gamely but awkwardly into an array of hard-to-crack new markets. Then, suddenly, demand for its products fell straight through the floor. On March 8, the company warned Wall Street that its first-quarter numbers were going to be gruesome-that its revenues were likely to be down 25 percent from the previous quarter (their worst showing in a decade or more) and that it had no choice but to whack 5,000 jobs from its payroll. By the time the closing bell chimed the following day, Intel's shares had plunged 11 percent and its market value stood at less than $200 billion, having fallen from a peak of nearly $500 billion in August 2000.

A truly god-awful day, no doubt about it; but in the miserable spring of 2001, pretty much par for the course. The day before Intel issued its warning, Yahoo! had issued one of its own; the day after, Cisco announced that it was taking a $300-400 million write-down and laying off roughly 10 percent of its workforce.

This carnage and all the rest added up to what Grove describes bluntly as a full-blown high-tech recession-a recession so deep and precipitous that observers both inside and outside Silicon Valley are struggling to understand exactly what it means. Does it mean, for example, that there is no new economy? That the import of the Internet was vastly oversold? That the transformation of capitalism trumpeted by the Valley was really little more than a sales pitch for a slew of schlocky IPOs? What was real?

What was bogus? And what does the future of high tech hold?

On two occasions recently, I ~at down with Grove to talk through these issues and many more. At 64, he has mellowed to the point where, listening to him hold fOlih for any length of time, you can almost forget his legendary reputation as a hardass and a hothead. Almost. He wears dark-shaded turtlenecks and wide-waled corduroys; his once-sharp features have softened and grown more handsome with age. He often comes across like

The Internet boom was a surreal time here in Silicon Valley.

What stands out in your memOlY about it?

ANDY GROVE: There are flashes I remember. I remember being shocked by the Netscape IPO. I was quite familiar with Netscape, and for that company to be valued at $4 billion or $5 billion after it came out-that stunned me. But that shock had a positive impact, because it made me think, Hey, you better rethink your prejudices, because people are seeing something here that you are not seeing. I mean, I thought the browser was an interesting piece of software, but not a life-altering or strategy-altering technology. So 1995 was a wake-up call for me. By 1997, I was probably in the same place as the stock market: enthusiastic, starting to see potential, marveling over some of the things you could do on the Internet. In the 1998-99 time frame, I got more familiar with some of the startups, and I was really impressed with the innovative ideas and new ways of doing business that they represented. Amazon was emerging; Yahoo! was emerging. When I first saw My Yahoo!, the richness of it, the layers, I was stunned. And then in 1999-2000, I was starting to get uncomfortable. That was when Intel started buying companies. The irrational exuberance was painfully appar-

ent in the prices we had to pay. So I went through a cycle: I was behind the market, then I was even with it, then I fell behind again in terms of my sense of the Internet's potential. Now, I'm probably more optimistic than the market is.

Maybe "Internet economy" is a more apt phrase than "new economy"?

It has the virtue at least of being more precise. I have been quoted saying that, in the future, all companies will be Internet companies. I still believe that. More than ever, really.

There ~ obviously been a major shift in sentiment against the Internet, and part of the reason, I think, is that people confuse the Internet economy with the Internet industfy-the nowdisgraced dotcoms.

If it was only the dotcoms imploding, I don't think the sentiment would have shifted so much. A bunch of other things were happening at the same time the dotcoms blew up. I think the investment in communications infrastructure got ahead of demand. People spent billions of dollars buying spectrum$100 billion to $200 billion was spent in Europe alone-anticipating data demand that I believe will come, but not at the rate assumed by the investments. AT&T spent more than $100 billion buying cable companies on the premise of data demand, but the deployment is so far behind, we don't even know if the demand is there, because you can't get it anyway. The point is that there are additional problems that go beyond consumer e-commerce-the dotcom deal-being in trouble. This is hard stuff.

And it is hard stuff that takes more effort and longer time and development to make a business out of than we anticipated at the front end. Altogether, the industry got ahead of itself. I mean, dotcoms are only, what, 10 percent of the customer base?

infrastructure. The hundreds of billions of dollars that got invested in telecommunications, for example. You know, when the information highway was the craze, the question I would ask [then-Bell Atlantic CEO] Ray Smith and [then-TCI chair] John Malone was, Who the hell is going to spend the billions of dollars it will take to build this thing out? You guys? The federal government? It's not going to happen. And no one could give me an answer as to who was going to pay. Well, it turns out that the answer was the investing public, who rabidly ran and shoved the money into the hands of the infrastructure builders. It is probably true that the infrastructure would have gotten built anyway. But instead of it happening over 15 years, it happened over five, because of the gold rush mentality and all these investors trying to get in on it. So the boom accelerated the deployment of the infrastructure, and I'm talking about the Amazons of the world as much as the JDS Uniphases. Amazon's database is a kind of infrastructure-commerce-related infrastructure. When [Merrill Lynch analyst] Henry Blodget projected Amazon would go to $400 and the investing public rushed in, they were funding the deployment of Amazon's infrastructure, which is part of the totality of the Internet infrastructure. And all I can think is, How would this all have happened any other way?

What about the investors left holding the bag?

They invested voluntarily. They were trying to cash in on a speculative opportunity. Some portion of them made out on the deal, but trillions of dollars have disappeared, so obviously a lot more didn't.

The Internet

But they were the poster children for the Internet economy. It wasn t because of Cisco that people started saying, "The Net changes everything. " That phrase drove me nuts! The Internet doesn't change everything. It doesn't change supply and demand. It doesn't magically allow you to build businesses by turning investors' money into operating expenses indefinitely. The money always runs out eventually-the Internet doesn't change that, as we have seen.

I assume you think this market correction is a healthy thing?

I suppose-but the boom was healthy too, even with its excesses. Because what this incredible valuation craze did was draw untold sums of billions of dollars into building the Internet

doesn't change

everything. It doesn't change

supply and demand.

You could almost see it as a tax~a voluntary tax, with at least some upside potential.

Yes. And, like with taxes, there was real social benefit here.

The social benefit is the wholesale deployment of the infrastructure for the future of commerce.

You mentioned Amazon. What~ your take? Does it have a future?

I think Amazon is the preeminent pioneer in building a new way of doing commerce: personalized, database-driven commerce, where the big value is not in the purchase fulfillment, but in knowing as much about a customer base of 10 or 20 million people as a corner store used to know about a customer base of

SPAN MARCH/APRIL

2002

37

a few hundred. In today's mass-merchandising world, that's largely gone; Amazon is trying to use computer technology to re-establish it. They are probably on release 2.0 of what they are doing. They've been criticized for some of their experiments, but 20 million people keep going back, which is a very good sign that what they are doing is working.

The investing public seems less patient than you are~especia!!y when it comes to Amazon s profitability.

And Amazon clearly thought the largesse of those investors was going to last longer than it did. They took that money and expanded horizontally into the spectrum of products, and they ran into pretty classical problems there.

The most direct way of

productivity

â&#x20AC;˘

Changes on that scale are pretty rare-once a century, maybe.

Or maybe once a half-century. This particular once-a-half-century change is due to the combination of the microprocessor and connectedness. And the most interesting aspect is that the change hasn't nearly run its course yet. We are likely to see layered on top of it a change of comparable significance in the area of genetics, molecular biology, and the like, which would absolutely be inconceivable without very powerful and highly connected and available computers. The impact of that change on drug development, health care, and human life is difficult to imagine. But is it part of the computing/connectedness change?

Or should we think of it as a new change unto itself? The reason I ask is that, if this change happens as extensively as some people think it might, the consequences could be far more important than the enabler. Compared with directly altering life and death, computers and the Internet don't seem like such a big deal. But without the computers and connectedness, the genetics/mo~ecu~ar biology stuff would never get off the ground.

â&#x20AC;˘ Increasing

in a lesser things faster.

is doing the same thing

period of time-turning

Wasit smartfor Amazon to fly to become the Wal-Mm'tof the Web? I'm dubious. It was a very expensive decision that runs into other problems as well. They have fine-tuned the delivery of small-packaged standard goods-books, CDs, DVDs, and the like. But the brand doesn't necessarily extend as easily to barbecue grills.

Do you think they'll survive?

Yes. Not get bought.

Right. In fact, a little while ago I put a bunch of money into Amazon stock. I thought their price had come down far enough-I bought at $24. So I lost more than half of my investment. But I decided to put money in the two companies I thought represented what e-commerce should be-the other one was Webvan. There I lost almost everything I put in.

Has anything that s ever happened to the economy qualified as a phase change?

Maybe Gutenberg and the printing press. I don't know. I think the changes in the part of the economy that I have the right to comment on, the things that I've witnessed in my lifetime, have all been incremental changes.

Including the integrated circuit? The microprocessor?

Yes. I think they are horrendously significant inventions.

Computing being distributed and being made pervasive-this has changed the world. But so did electric motors, the telephone, and da da da.

You said before that the Internet doesn't change everything.

Whats the most important thing it does change?

It makes everything faster. Genomics discoveries come faster.

You can crack data faster. You can build and correct supply lines faster. You can get information faster. E-mail has absolutely changed interpersonal and intercompany communication in a fairly profound way. That phrase "Internet time"-that's real.

It's not always pleasant, by the way. I used to laugh at my friends who are doctors for being tethered to their beepers. Well, that's all of us now. But everything being faster also has enormous benefits. The most direct way of increasing productivity is doing the same thing in a lesser period of time-turning things faster.

And productivity is the key to everything-greater productivity increases economic growth.

Intel right now is trying to pull off a pretty difficult strategic transition in a pretty harsh climate in the high-tech business. In the 111 id-I980s, you pulled off something similar~and its become the subject of a thousand case studies. How do the situations compare?

In the 1980s, our existing core business-memory chipswas in disaITay. We were putting about 40 percent of our developmental capital spending into a business that represented only 3 to 4 percent of our revenue and in which we had a market share on to 4 percent. There was nothing wrong with that business in terms of growth potential, but we had become marginalized by our Japanese competitors. There really was no viable option for us to work our way out. We had a situation where the defining

business of the company had hit not a pothole but an ultimate wall, and we had to make a very desperate move. It was fOl1unate that we had made investments in microprocessors, secondary though they were, which had been going on for a long time.

So we gave up the memory business and committed to microprocessors as our new path. It was a very dramatic, complete shift of emphasis, and it entailed a very major retrenchment to resize the company; roughly speaking, one-third of the company was shut down and laid off, with factories closing and all of that. And then the PC really took off, and we were positioned to benefit from that, and the rest is history.

What we have now is a very different situation. As of December 2000, at least, there was nothing horribly wrong with our core business. We have a very powerful position in the microprocessor market. But we also have a new silicon opportunity in communications-in connecting all those computers together-which is faster growing than our core business. So we have this new opportunity, but we cannot pull the same trick as we pulled in 1985-86. If we did that, we would be walking away from one of the most lucrative businesses-in which we have one of the most unusual positions, and maybe the most unusual position in any manufacturing business-in the world.

It's hard to find another manufacturing business where the incumbent has a presence like ours in microprocessors. So what we have is a mandate to take advantage of the communications opportunity, but we cannot (A) reposition the focus of the company or (B) reduce our expenditure rate and size the company to the new opp0l1unity without damaging our core business. The way 1 have described it is a shift in emphasis not from A to B but from A to A + B-which is actually harder in some ways.

The compounding factor, which we didn't really have any sense of until the beginning of 2001, is that we have a hightech recession on our hands. I cannot put a finer point on it. It is a recession, and it is a pervasive one. It is true in all sectors, from semiconductors to fiber optics to storage, and 1think it is a cyclical recession. Now, this aspect is actually a bit similar to the 1984-86 time frame, when we didn't really have a fullblown high-tech recession, but we did have a cyclical setback in PCs and a major consolidation in the PC business. There wasn't a general industrial recession then; it was targeted on PCs and had to do with overproduction in that segment. What we're seeing today is much broader, and it comes at a time when we at Intel need to double-up investments; we don't have an oppOliunity to cut back or retrench. So in a sense it is not as white-knuckle now-our existence was at stake in 1985; J

don't think that's true today-but as a strategic and managerial challenge, it's actually a lot more complicated than it was in 1985. We have to balance three factors: the microprocessor business, the communications business, and the recession.

Back then, we had only two.

Intel has made more than 30 acquisitions in the past three years. Is there a limit to how big you can get?

We can be a lot bigger than we are now. That is the significance of communications as a field. We are probably as big as we can get in computing, approximately speaking. We can pick up graphics in our chipsets and this and that, but we're not going to double our size, given the size of the computer industry. In communications, we are already a fairly significant player, but our share of that business is a fraction of what it is in computing, and the business itself is as big as computing or maybe bigger. There may be a theoretically derivable size that is impossible to manage-that's bigger than a $100 billion technology company. I don't know. It hasn't been tested. But that's not what's limiting us. Had we put the same investment into communications that we put into videoconferencing, and done it at the same time, we probably would be twice the size in communications that we are today.

We have a new

silicon opportunity

in communicationS-in

connecting all those

computers together.

Why is it important to be a lot bigger than you are now?

Maybe it's obvious, but why does that matter?

Growth is kinda built into everyone's genes. It's built into management's genes, the salesman's genes, the investors' desires.

People expect companies to grow. Management measures its perfOlmance by growth. Employees measure their oppOl1unities by potential to grow. Growth is the fe11ilizer for the tree that a company becomes. Why do you get up in the morning if all you do is serve exactly the same market with the same customers and the same products? It's not a healthy state not to grow-from the investment, employee, or strategic standpoint.

Stagnation sets in.

Yes. And then you're hit with a fork in the road like we were in 1985 or 1999, and you're incapable of responding. You have to keep a company scrappy at all times in order to be ready for whatever comes your way, and without fighting for growth, you lose that scrappiness.

If Intel hadn t made the transition in 1985, it might have died.

Describe the risk now.

Stagnation. Lack of growth. Being restricted to a market that's further along the S curve than the communications market; a market that in many segments is more of a replacement market than a new penetration market. The risk then is that the scrappiness of the company would go away, the vitality would go away. When there is an opportunity that you can pursue, if you choose not to pursue it you are choosing a different corporate persona. It is entirely possible that the microprocessor business wi II not have a satisfactory growth rate in the years to come. We could accept that, we could choose to be a 10-percent-a-year company, we could adjust our spending and concentrate on being a very good IO-percent-a-year company. But we would not be the same Intel anymore.

I realize that

homework. So I ration the use of that role, which is probably one reason I have it.

Do you think much now about the issue of your legacywhether you have one, and, if so, what it is?

Intel is my legacy. I have no other legacy. Work-wise, that is.

Do you think that, with Intel, you laid down the bedrock on which the Valley was built?

I don't want to come across like some epitome of false modesty, but I really don't think of myself in this heroic, bronze-statue fashion. I think about the practical steps and practical questions-who should replace so and so, what the board should do, whether something is going to blow up in our face-rather than stepping back and admiring my past achievements.

You're not Ozymandias: "Look on my works. ye Mighty, and despair. " That's not me. It's odious for me to think in those terms. When I think about all that Intel has accomplished and the way it has enabled this industry to grow, I put the emphasis on Intel. I didn't do that; Intel did that. I was a leading member of an organization that did that. I carried my weight. I can be very proud of that, very happy about that. But that's it.

I've had a fantastic life. I arrived in the Valley and my first assignment in my first job, at Fairchild, was to analyze the characteristics of MaS (metal oxide semiconductor) capacitors. In six weeks, I was one of the world's experts in a field that was a cornerstone of this industry-I mean, how lucky can you get? And it's gone like that ever since. At Fairchild, in the scientific sense; at Intel, in the industrial sense-I was there at the right moment and I made, if not the most of it, pretty close to the most of those opportunities. So I feel very fortunate to have had those opportunities and very satisfied with what I made of them. But I'm also very mindful that had I made a different choice-had I gone to a different university, or decided to work back east instead of here in the west, or if my timing had been off by just two years-the same me would not have accomplished nearly so much. Oh, I would have had a good career. But I did have certain lucky breaks in terms of timing that was not my merit.

As I said, I've had a wonderful life. What people are going to write about me 10 years after I'm dead-who cares?

D

people do listen

and I appreciate that extremely much.

But one

of the ways I get that hearing is that

sound off

to me,

I don't

on every damn subject.

You've also spoken out in favor of federal legislation on electronic privacy and against the idea that Internet commerce should be exempt from sales tax. Are you starting to think of yourself as a spokesperson for the technology industry?

I think of myself as somebody who has the luxury to speak his mind more of the time than many other people in the industry. And with that luxury comes a certain responsibility to say what I think is true, even if it isn't all what the industry collectively thinks. I certainly wasn't speaking for the industry when I said that Internet commerce should be taxed in a neutral fashion. I got a whole lot of complimentary e-mails about that-but not from anyone in the industry! But I just couldn't hold up my head and argue with a straight face that it's in the public's interest to give tax advantages to e-commerce. If! had been a spokesman for the industry, I would have been constrained by the lowest common denominator. On that deal, I was a spokesman only for myself.

Even so, people are starting to think of you as Silicon Valley's elder statesman.

I realize that people do listen to me, and I appreciate that extremely much. But one of the ways I get that hearing is that I don't sound off on every damn subject. I tend to concentrate on things where I have something to say, and I do a lot of

About the Interviewer: with Wired magazine.

John Heilemann

is a special correspondent

Battle between Crusaders and Moslems Ie Roman de Godefi"oi de Bouillon (l4th centwy)

Is This a Religious Waril The Osama bin Ladens of the world-like the leaders of the Inquisition and others before and after themdemand that all embrace absolute faith. Individual faith and pluralism were the targets September 11, and it was only the beginning of an epic battle.

erhaps the most admirable part of the response to the conflict that began on September 11 has been a general reluctance to call it a religious war. Officials and commentators have rightly stressed that this is not a battle between the Muslim world and the West, that the murderers are not representative of Islam.

President Bush went to the Islamic Center in Washington to reinforce the point. At prayer meetings across the United States and throughout the world, Muslim leaders have been included alongside Christians, Jews and Buddhists.

The only problem with this otherwise laudable effort is that it doesn't hold up under inspection. The religious dimension of this conflict is central to its meaning.

The words of Osama bin Laden are saturated with religious argument and theological language. Whatever else the Taliban regime is in Afghanistan, it is fanatically religious. Although some Muslim leaders have criticized the terrorists, and even Saudi Arabia's rulers have distanced themselves from the militants, other Muslims in the Middle East and elsewhere have not denounced these acts, have been conspicuously silent or have indeed celebrated them. The telTorists' strain of Islam is clearly not shared by most Muslims and is deeply unrepresentative of Islam's glorious, civilized and peaceful past. But it surely represents a part of Islam-a radical, fundamentalist pm1-that simply cannot be ignored or denied.

In that sense, this surely is a religious war-but not of Islam versus Christianity and Judaism. Rather, it is a war offundamentalism against faiths of all kinds that are at peace with freedom and modernity.

This war even has far gentler echoes in America's own religious conflictsbetween newer, more virulent strands of Christian fundamentalism and mainstream Protestantism and Catholicism.

These conflicts have ancient roots, but they seem to be gaining new force as modernity spreads and deepens. They are our new wars of religion-and their victims are in all likelihood going to mount

with each passing year.

Osama bin Laden himself couldn't be clearer about the religious underpinnings of his campaign of terror. In 1998, he told his followers, "The call to wage war against America was made because America has spearheaded the crusade against the Islamic nation, sending tens of thousands of its troops to the land of the two holy mosques over and above its meddling in its affairs and its politics and its support of the oppressive, corrupt and tyrannical regime that is in control."

Notice the use of the word "crusade," an explicitly religious term, and one that simply ignores the fact that the last few major American interventions abroad-in Kuwait, Somalia and the Balkans-were all conducted in defense of Muslims.

Notice also that as bin Laden understands it, the "crusade" America is alleged to be leading is not against Arabs but against the Islamic nation, which spans many ethnicities.

This nation knows no nation-states as they actually exist in the region-which is why this form ofIslamic fundamentalism is also so worrying to the rulers of many Middle Eastern states. Notice also that bin Laden's beef is with American troops defiling the land of Saudi Arabia-"the land of the two holy mosques," in Mecca and Medina. In I998, he also told followers that his terrorism was "of the commendable kind, for it is directed at the tyrants and the aggressors and the enemies of Allah." He has a litany of grievances against Israel as well, but his concerns are not primarily territorial or procedural. "Our religion is under attack," he said baldly. The attackers are Christians and Jews. When asked to sum up his message to the people of the West, bin Laden couldn't have been clearer: "Our call is the call of Islam that was revealed to Muhammad. It is a call to all mankind.

We have been entrusted with good cause to follow in the footsteps of the messenger and to communicate his message to all nations."

This is a religious war against "unbelief and unbelievers," in bin Laden's words. Are these cynical words designed

merely to use Islam for nefarious ends?

We cannot know the precise motives of bin Laden, but we can know that he would not use these words if he did not think they had salience among the people he wishes to inspire and provoke. This form of Islam is not restricted to bin Laden alone.

Its roots lie in an extreme and violent strain in Islam that emerged in the 18th century in opposition to what was seen by some Muslims as Ottoman decadence but has gained greater strength in the 20th. For the past two decades, this form of Islamic fundamentalism has racked the Middle East. It has targeted almost every regime in the region and, as it failed to make progress, has extended its hostility into the West. From the assassination of Anwar Sadat to the fatwa against Salman Rushdie to the decade-long campaign of bin Laden to the destruction of ancient Buddhist statues and the hideous persecution of women and homosexuals by the Taliban to the World Trade Center massacre, there is a single line. That line is a fundamentalist, religious one. And it is an Islamic one.

Most interpreters of the Koran find no arguments in it for the murder of innocents. But it would be naive to ignore in [slam a deep thread of intolerance toward unbelievers, especially if those unbelievers are believed to be a threat to the Islamic world. There are many passages in the Koran urging mercy toward others, tolerance, respect for life and so on. But there are also passages as violent as this: "And when the sacred months are passed, kill those who join other gods with God wherever ye shall find them; and seize them, besiege them, and lay wait for them with every kind of ambush." And this: "Believers! Wage war against such of the infidels as are your neighbors, and let them find you rigorous." Bernard Lewis, the great scholar of Islam, writes of the dissonance within Islam: "There is something in the religious culture of Islam which inspired, in even the humblest peasant or peddler, a dignity and a courtesy toward others never exceeded and rarely equaled in other civilizations. And yet, in moments of upheaval and disrup-

tion, when the deeper passions are stirred, this dignity and cOUl1esy toward others can give way to an explosive mixture of rage and hatred which impels even the government of an ancient and civilized country-even the spokesman of a great spiritual and ethical religion-to espouse kidnapping and assassination, and try to find, in the life of their prophet, approval and indeed precedent for such actions." Since Muhammad was, unlike many other religious leaders, not simply a sage or a prophet but a ruler in his own right, this exploitation of his politics is not as great a stretch as some would argue.

his use of religion for extreme repression, and even terror, is not of course restricted to Islam. For most of its history, Christianity has had a worse record. From the Crusades to the Inquisition to the bloody religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, Europe saw far more blood spilled for religion's sake than the Muslim world did. And given how expressly nonviolent the teachings of the Gospels are, the perversion of Christianity in this respect was arguably greater than bin Laden's selective use ofIslam. But it is there nonetheless. It seems almost as if there is something inherent in reIigious monotheism that lends itself to this kind of terrorist temptation. And our bland attempts to ignore this-to speak of this violence as if it did not have religious roots-is some kind of denial. We don't want to denigrate religion as such, and so we deny that rei igion is at the heart of this. But we would understand this conflict better, perhaps, if we first acknowledged that religion is responsible in some way, and then figured out how and why.

The first mistake is surely to condescend to fundamentalism. We may disagree with it, but it has attracted millions of adherents for centuries, and for a good reason. It elevates and comf0l1s. It provides a sense of meaning and direction to those lost in a disorienting world.

The blind recourse to texts embraced as literal truth, the injunction to follow the commandments of God before anything else, the subjugation of reason and judgment and even conscience to the dictates of dogma: these can be

exhilarating and transformative. They have led human beings to perform extraordinary acts of both good and evil. And they have an internal logic to them. If you believe that there is an eternal afterlife and that endless indescribable t0l1ure awaits those who disobey God's law, then it requires no huge stretch of imagination to make sure that you not only conform to each diktat but that you also encourage and, if necessary, coerce others to do the same. The logic behind this is impeccable. Sin begets sin. The sin of others can corrupt you as well. The only solution is to construct a world in which such sin is outlawed and punished and constantly purged-by force if necessary. It is not crazy to act this way if you believe these things strongly enough. In some ways, it's crazier to believe these things and not act this way.

In a world of absolute truth, in matters graver than life and death, there is no room for dissent and no room for theological doubt.

Hence the reliance on literal interpretations of texts-because interpretation can lead to error, and error can lead to damnation. Hence also the ancient Cathol ic insistence on absolute church authority. Without infallibility, there can be no guarantee of truth. Without such a guarantee, confusion can lead to hell.

Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor makes the case perhaps as well as anyone. In the story told by Ivan Karamazov in "The Brothers Karamazov," Jesus returns to eat1h during the Spanish Inquisition. On a day when hundreds have been burned at the stake for heresy, Jesus performs miracles. Alarmed, the Inquisitor arrests Jesus and imprisons him with the intent of burning him at the stake as well. What folJows is a conversation between the Inquisitor and Jesus. Except it isn't a conversation because Jesus says nothing. It is really a dialogue between two modes of religion, an exploration of the tension between the extraordinary, transcendent claims of religion and human beings' inability to live up to them, or even fully believe them.

According to the Inquisitor, Jesus' crime was revealing that salvation was possible but still allowing humans the freedom to refuse it.

And this, to the Inquisitor, was a form of cruelty. When the truth involves the most important things imaginable-the meaning of life, the fate of one's eternal soul, the difference (Continued on page 57)

It seems as if there is something inherent in religious monotheism that lends itself to terrorist temptation.

Text by STEVE KEMPER Photographs by JASON MILLSTEIN

In the classroom and on '. the field; aspiring umpires discover how little they know about baseball

"People think it's just 'Ball,' 'Strike,' 'Safe,' 'Out,' " says Hunter Wendelstedt, a major league baseball umpire. "But it's not like that" Too true, as I learned recently during several humbling days at the Harry Wendelstedt School for Umpires in Ormond Beach, Florida. Even "safe" or "out" is no piece of cake. There's a drill at the school in which an instructor fires the ball to first as a runner races down the base path. Every armchair ump in America considers this routine, but the instructor times his throw to make the play tighter than white on rice.

Watching, I get at least a quarter of the calls wrong. If this were a real game, I'd be fending off furious players, for good reason. "You don't get to be a major league umpire unless you have exceptional judgment," says Harry Wendelstedt, who owns the school with his son, Hunter, and was a National League ump for 33 years.

"You've got consistency because you've seen thousands and thousands of pitches and plays."

The mental and physical rigors of the first two weeks have sent a dozen students scuttling for home and confounded the remaining 140. "I've been around baseball all my life," says Bill Coble, whose father is an umpire, "and the most difficult thing about this school is realizing how little you really know about the game."

Now, during the third week of the five-week course,

A bove: Coach Lany Vanover; a major league umpire. shows a masked student how to position himself behind the catcher so he can see the entire strike zone.

Right: During a mock game, instructors impersonating players put student umpires in situations where they have to make tough calls.

the students are making fewer gross mistakes, and the best prospects "are stm1ing to stick out like green lights," says Harry Wendelstedt. They range in age from 18 to the late forties, but most are in their early to mid-twenties. A few came with the modest aspiration of umpiring high school or college ball; the rest are chasing a grander dream-to turn pro and move up to the Bigs.

"1 wasn't good enough to play baseball," says Sky Borie, a 20-year-old from Chico, California, "so I came here to pursue the next best thing." Brian Wright, an earnest young Texan, is here for the second time. "I want it more than life itself," he tells me. "You spend three hours a day on a ball field and get paid. It doesn't get much better than that. And I see the way people here look at these professional umpires; I'd like people to look at me like that someday."

The Wendelstedts' school has trained more major league umps than any other progrmTI.This year it will send about 25 students to the next level, a professional evaluation camp. An equal number will attend from the other cel1ified school, the Jim Evans Academy of Professional Umpiring. About 40 will be offered jobs, all in the lowest rung of the minors, the Rookie Leagues.

Few will reach the majors. Hunter Wendelstedt's estimate is one or two percent. Those who do make it will pay a lot of

dues in the minors. The contrasts are stark. Big league umps fly first class, work in four-man crews, get several weeks' vacation during the season, and make between $86,000 and $260,000 a year, plus bonuses.

Umps in Rookie and Single-A ball, on the other hand, work their tails off in two-man crews, taking the plate every other night. They endure more grief than major league umps because they make more mistakes and because younger players have shorter tempers. After a game, they drive to the next town, which might be 10 hours away, where they share a cheap hotel room. They get a few days off per season and make about $2,000 a month. During the off-season they work as substitute teachers or waiters or high school sports officials.

If they're very good-if they show that they can control the game, control themselves, and seldom misconstrue the rulesthey may move up a level every two or three years. By the time they reach the highest rung of the minors, Triple-A, where the salary tops off at $3,400 a month, they may still be years away from the Big Show. As more than one of the school's instructors told me, "You gotta love the game."

The school's morning classroom session combines blackboard instruction on some thorny issue, followed by questions from the students and a test on the rules. The rule book is base-

A few came with the modest aspiration of umpiring high school or college ball; the rest are chasing a grander dream-to turn pro and move up to the Bigs.

ball's equivalent of, combined, the Talmud, the Ten Commandments, the Bill of Rights and the Code of Federal Regulations. It contains hundreds of byzantine clauses and subclauses in fastidious prose. ("The pitcher shall deliver the pitch to the batter who may elect to strike the ball, or who may not offer at it, as he chooses.") Every finicky rule can be traced to some conniving player or unforeseen incident that once threw a game into chaos.

Chaos is an umpire's mortal enemy, and the rule book is his sword and shield against it. So the students ask questions, and Charlie ReI iford, the school's energetic chief instructor, an II-year veteran in the National League, provides them with scholarly answers.

After the morning skull session, students report to the diamonds. During the first two weeks, they undergo intense field instruction about fundamentals such as positioning, mechanics, timing ("pause, read, react") and voice ("Louder! You gotta sell it!"). Tn the afternoon, they play "control games" in which the instructors concoct situations the students must unravel using the rule book and all the proper mechanics, in correct sequence. From the third week on, the students get tested in action, umpiring high school and college games.

One morning I join a drill focused on balks and obstruction.

The rule book devotes more than three pages to balks, a tribute to the ingenuity of pitchers who constantly invent devious new ways to deceive batters and runners and gain an unfair edge.

For instance, if a pitcher doesn't come to a complete stop during his windup before throwing to the plate, that's a balk. But if he stops twice, that's also a balk. If he stops with the ball over his head, balk. And once he comes to a full stop, if he so much as flexes a knee, dips a shoulder or twitches anything at all, it's a balk.

So when the pitcher has the ball, the umpire behind home plate and the umpire in the field must scrutinize his every move. "And at the same time," says Andy Roberts, who's tutoring me, "you have to be thinking about potential pick-off plays, potential obstruction, a potential ball-out-of-play on an overthrow, a potential hit and a potential steaL" I won't go into the labyrinth of subclauses lurking beneath those seemingly simple words "obstruction," "out-of-play" and "ovetihrow."

Steve Cox, an ump in the Double-A Texas League, is on the mound impersonating a pitcher. When it's my turn as field umpire, with runners on first and second, I take up my position near second base. Cox winds up. Behind me, Roberts whispers, There's the balk! Call it!"

I raise my arms, yell "Time!" and then point forcefully at

each runner in turn and shout, with a tremendous authority I do not feel, "You! Third each base! You! Second base!"-awarding runner a penalty base. It turns out that Cox committed a balk by sneaking his foot off the rubber during his windup, but I missed it.

I'm glad the plate ump missed it too.

"You have to be a good field umpire," says Larry Vanover, a ational League ump, "but behind the plate is where you make your money, because you control the game from there. If you can't do that, you'll never move up." And then he offers what strikes me as an excellent description of umpiring. "Everything is geared to knowing what you see."

I watch Vanover instruct a student in the batting cage. "I line my nose up right here," he says, scratching a line in the ditt. Then he nudges the student's right foot forward and says, "You have to get up in the slot. If your head is too far back, you'll miss one on the outside corner. ow relax," he adds with a smile. "You've got a 50-50 chance of making the right calL" When it's my turn in the cage, Danny Cricks, an ump in the Southern League, shows me the checklist he uses to evaluate students: Stance, Timing, Tunnel Vision, Blinking, Flinching, Mechanics, Voice and Judgment. My initial stance, cowering behind the catcher, cuts off my view of the outside corner.

Cricks moves me into the slot between batter and catcher and asks how it feels. "Like I'm going to take one right in the face," I say, which no doubt would lead to poor marks under Blinking and Flinching. Steve Cox works on his blinking and flinching by lying in his hotel room with his mask on, throwing a ball up, and letting it land on his face.

The pitching machine flings a ball toward the plate at 120 kilometers per hour, poky for professionals but plenty zippy for an amateur umpire wearing bifocals. "Ball low!" 1 yell.

Mistake, says Cricks-don't explain or describe your call unless you like arguments. When the next pitch hits the catcher's glove, I shout, "Ball!" but realize a split second later that it was right down the pipe-a strike. "Think first," says Cricks, "then call it."

I slowly improve, and am relieved that in the cage I don't have to worry about runners, balks, checked swings, foul tips, shouting managers and crowd noise. Cricks and Vanover are kind enough to say that I did well. I accept their praise because there's no use arguing with an umpire. And after seeing how complicated the job is, I've vowed never to boo an ump again.

At least not until some presbyopic lunkhead miscalls a play for the Yankees against my Red Sox. D About the Author: Steve Kemper is afreelance contributes to Smithsonian.

writer who regularly

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he architecture world remembers the 1960s as a decade in which three of the most renowned masters of the modernist movement died within four years of each other: Le Cm'busier in 1965, Mies van del' Rohe and Walter Gropius in 1969. At the time there seemed little reason, apart from a shared Minimalist angularity, to mention Frank Stella in the same breath with any of them. While he had already made a name for himselfin the world of the visual arts, it was confined to the realm of painting, and most observers would have figured him among the least volumetrically minded artists alive. The austere early black paintings associated with his first public showing had given way to a series of colorful shaped canvases that initially featured polygons and later emphasized protractor-derived curves. In all these efforts, Stella maintained a stylistic consistency that assured him a central place among the Post-Painterly Abstractionists, who kept their works free of any incident that might compromise the flatness of the picture plane. In fact, the nalTOWstrips that he placed next to each other were parallel and undeviating in their two-dimensionality.

His oeuvre was about as close to Euclidean geometry as American painting got in those days.

Fast-forward to the present, to a site in downtown Miami along the edge of Biscayne Bay, where a building-a bandshelldesigned by Stella in 1999, has been constructed. The argument

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has been advanced, plausibly, that it is more sculpture than architecture, but its designer's insistence that it is meant primarily as the latter is borne out not only by the fact that it is large and functional enough to house musical performances but by the resemblance it bears to the palpably architectural projects that have consumed much of his time since the early 1990s. Models and sketches of several of these, together with a mock-up of the bandshell, were included in a major exhibition of Stella's recent work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami.

Note of Stella's architectural endeavors has been taken from time to time in the international press, but the Miami bandshell is his first commission not only realized but open to the public, and it is worthy of attention in itself as well as in relation to two kindred contexts-Stella's individual development and the current values of the architectural world at large.

Contrary to public perception, Stella's interest in architectonic concepts actually began in the early stages of his career, coming actively alive when he was fashioning the polygon canvases

Right. Model (first version) for Kunstalle and Garden, Dresden, 1992, colored Sintra and plastel; 25 cm x 142 cm x 91 cm.

Far right. Model (third version) for Kunstalle and Garden, Dresden, 1993, Sintra and wood, 25cm x 142cm x 91 cm.

of the mid-1960s. He has recorded the moment himself, in an essay dealing with his first building project, a pavilion conceived in 1991 and intended as an addition to Alessandro Mendini's Groningen Museum in the Netherlands: Since the program called for a sympathetic home for the art of the past, it seemed appropriate to take a pictorial approach to architectural design ...In those paintings, simple geometric shapes interacted with each other so that they occupied the same plane rather than overlapping. It made an effective two-dimensional image, especially when the background support plane was cut away, leaving a shaped canvas with an irregular perimeter. It seemed natural to seek the same effect in three dimensions. A pyramid pushed into a cube must work as well as a triangle stuck into a square.

If one takes Stella at his word, it would appear that his work as well as his ruminations about it began as early as the 1960s to leave the safe harbor of the picture plane in order to explore the open sea of volumes and masses. To be sure, the journey took a while-fully 20 years-but he followed a remarkably unbroken path, arriving at a destination that in retrospect now seems almost foreordained. In the early 1970s, the polygons were treated as reliefs, with some planes set literally in front of others, the overall three-dimensional effect heightened by the manner in which one plane gradually moved toward the viewer, emerging from the surface shared with another.

Moreover, in the mid-1970s, Stella began fmiher expressive investigations, adding surface brushwork, thus differentiating some planes texturally from others, and introducing looping forms taken from french curves. By the beginning of the 1980s,

the early planar seventIes had been radically exchanged for tableaux featuring high reliefs, charged color applied in whiplash strokes and furious, almost chaotic compositions. The geometry was still apparent in pillar and cone like forms that took on a measure of volumetric illusionism, but the disparity between their crisp edges and the organic tumult around them signaled a concomitant shift in mood. The neutrality associated with Stella's famous description, "what you see is what you see," was exchanged for an increasingly baroque intensity that fully engaged the viewer emotionally. n 1986, Stella mounted an II-meter-high Cone and Pillar relief on the wall of an office building at 599 Lexington Avenue in New York, and, as he put it, "It sparked something in me. I started becoming a public artist instead of a gallery artist."

The steady move away from the planarities of the early work to large-scaled exercises in three-dimensionality brought Stella ever closer to addressing an actual architectural problem, which followed with Mendini's request for a contribution to the Groningen Museum. Stella's solution, produced with the assistance of British engineer Peter Rice and American atiist Earl Childress, was clearly dependent on the polygon paintings of the J 960s. The original ground plan was based on the shapes of two asymmetrical leaves, with curvilinear venations that determined the organization of interior column-concealing walls. The roof was an undulating surface with markings that duplicated the tracks of the walls below. Stella later changed the design substantially, turning the interior into a column-free, cage like structure with a gently sloping floor, at which point he fell into disagreement with the Dutch client and lost the commission.

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What is worth remembering, however, is the unmistakable derivation of the design from preceding paintings and sculptures. Indeed, the project that followed it, in 1992, the Desert Museum intended for Israel (but never built), took its ground plan from the protractor series of 1967. Now the Groningen "cage" reappeared, as an open-air structure that would contain a restaurant and a sculpture garden.

This project also never saw its way to completion, but Stella proceeded with another design that must be regarded as his most ambitious architectural effort to date-one, moreover, that graphically illustrated the theoretical position he has adopted.

The clients were Rolf and Erika Hoffmann of Cologne, realestate developers and collectors of contemporary ali who had in mind the creation of a public park in Dresden, on land donated by the German state government. The park would have replaced the Herzogin Garden, one of the city's proudest outdoor spaces, which dated from the Renaissance but had been in dilapidated condition following the air raids of World War II and had remained idle even after the reunification of East and West Germany in 1989. The Hoffmanns commissioned a design from Stella, who wished to include within the park a kunsthalle and several other pavilions, one of them a reconceived version of the Orangerie that once occupied a part of the garden.

If the sources from which Stella took his inspiration were consistent with his ends, they were worlds apart in their origins. One source was the organic and crystalline forms of the visionary drawings that comprised Bruno Taut's 1917 folio Alpine Architecture. A second was a cheap little sun hat Stella bought on the beach at Rio de Janeiro: a flat piece of foam rubber incised with curves swirling out from its center. This simple item could be opened and worn on the head, creating a three-dimen-

sional cap out of flat strips alternating with empty spaces. It was a vernacular object that perfectly suited Stella's formal interests, and he borrowed its form for his proposed Orangerie. He would later find other uses for the beach hat, including its effect on the Miami bandshell plan, but only after the Dresden authorities tumed down his proposal for the Herzogin Garden.

Partly in response to that rejection (and partly to satisfy his own purposes), Stella wrote an article in 1992 titled "Critique of Architecture," in which he gave voice to his interpretation of the ends and means of architecture. The simplest way to characterize the statement is to quote the opening passage: Freud said the mother's body is a primal landscape. It's a good guess that our attempts to create a habitable landscape express our wish to recreate the primal landscape. For us, architecture is the tool for shaping a habitable landscape. A problem arises as we lose touch with our unconscious goal. The desire to be independent of the mother's body and the urge to master it have altered our initial vision of the habitable landscape. That is to say, these feelings, shaped by biology and gravity which commit us to an upright and erect posture, have obscured some very necessary goals of architecture. What I have to say today is simply an attempt to bring to our attention the value of the romantic, fanciful, organic architecture of the past and to suggest that technology can do something positive to improve our now barely habitable landscape. I also make a smaller point that I believe artists can now as they have in the past make a helpful contribution to the invention of some necessalY new, or, at least slightly more thoughtful building processes. I believe that the ability of artists to extend a meaningful note of the pictorial into the domain of sculpture and architecture will help enrich our habitable landscape.

"The Prince of Homburg " (titled Prinz Friederich von Homburg, Ein Schauspiel, 3X), Stella's monumental outdoor sculpture crafted of aluminum, jiberglass and carbon jiber, was officially christened by the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., in December 2001. Stella took the title ji-om a 19th-century German play about military victory. The sculpture, he explained, has many features of actual combat and creativity in its movement and confusion. It stands in marked contrast to the Graeco-Roman symmetry of Washington's public buildings. It wasn't meant to be installed in the Us. capital originally. "It's a nice coincidence, " the artist said.

uch language was foreign to the thinking of most architects a decade ago, and surely Freudian thought is rarely if ever cited (except by Stella) in contemporary discussions of the building art. Moreover, today's designers continue to take their cues more regularly from other designers than from painters and sculptors. Yet some of Stella's other comments can be related to recent developments that extend beyond his own work.

In this connection it is worth reflecting on the influence that German Expressionism has exerted on building design of the last 10 years. Although the architects associated with that early 20th-century movement used demonstrably different stylistic devices than did the artists identified with it, the two groups had in common a strong tendency to awaken an emotional response in the viewer rather than to employ principles normally allied with rationality. Evidence for a degree of shared formal purpose can also be found in the drawings of Hans Scharoun and Hans Poelzig and in the graphic work of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Of even greater effect on contemporary architects are the willfully unrestrained curvilinear masses of the Expressionist architect Hermann Finsterlin, to whom Philip Johnson, among others, has paid closer attention in the 1990s than ever before. Finsterlin's work is regarded by Victoria Newhouse in her recent book Towards a New Museum as similar to, if not the direct stylistic source of, Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.

Newhouse reports that Stella himself leaves no doubt about his own opinion: "He considers German Expressionism to be the

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high point of 20th-century architecture: Erich Mendelsohn, Otto Bartning, Hermann Finsterlin and Bruno Taut are his models."

Hence Stella's low opinion of the modernist glass-and-steel buildings that dominate today's cities, and hence, too, his emphasis on "the romantic, fanciful, organic architecture of the past." He follows this phrase with a reference to the influence the computer has had on recent building design. For it has been the instrument by which nonrectilinear forms have been most readily conceived and brought to material realization. This fact shows in Stella's work, not to mention that of Johnson, Gehry and the growing number of practitioners of so-called "blob" architecture (most of whom arrive at their designs with the help of animation software). Such schemes imply that a stylistic sea change in architectural practice may be in the works at the turn ofthe 21 st century. It remains to be seen how extensive the shift will be eventually, since the right angle still has its devotees throughout the world, but Stella is clearly not alone in the priorities he has assumed for himself.

Yet regardless of the degree to which it typifies certain current modes of thought, his own work maintains its individuality, and the effect of that odd little sun hat cannot be overlooked. Stella constantly maintains his belief in the pictorial as a source for architecture as well as for sculpture. The flat strips derived from the unfolded hat are the formal descendants of his paintings, early and late, as well as the generating elements in several of his speculative architectural projects without preordained sites, most evidently the Chapel of the Holy Ghost (1991) and the Gatehouse (1992).

From these last two works it is only a short step to the composition of the bandshell in downtown Miami. The structure is an elaborate organization of interlocking strips, so assembled that it functions, clearly and handsomely, as a shelter partially open to the sky and equipped with stage and proscenium. It is constructed of aluminum and painted white, a color appropriate not only to Florida's bright sunlight but to the baked enamel cladding of the large new building that rises behind the bandshell: the American Airlines Arena, an indoor stadium (designed by the Miami firm of Arquitectonica) that will serve as the home of the Miami Heat, the city's professional basketball franchise.

Whi Ie the 10-meter height of Stella's bandshell lends it a monumentality appropriate to its architectural character, its resemblance to sculpture endows it with an arresting duality, since as both working space and abstract form it is notable for the certainty of proportions and elegance of composition that we have come to expect from this artist at his best. Moreover, it is impressive enough to warrant the hope that larger commissions will come Stella's way, granting him the opportunity to prove in material form that he is equal to the substantial promise his recent unbuilt proposals have suggested.

D About the Author: Franz Schulze is a professor of art at Lake Forest College and an architecture critic. His books include Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography (1985) and Philip Johnson: Life and Work (1994).

braham Lincoln once said: "I am the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on earth." When his 12-year-old son, Tad, stood beside his coffin, he was told that Lincoln had gone to heaven. Tad is reported to have answered: "Then 1 am glad, for he was not really happy here."

It is indeed remarkable that Lincoln who was temperamentally a profoundly sad man and of whom it was said that melancholy dripped from him as he walked could at the same time enjoy the crazy nonsense of human incongruity with such gay abandon that the painter Francis B. Carpenter said of his laughter that "the neigh of a wild horse on his native prairie is not more undisguised and hemty."

The fact is that Lincoln was a man of two moods, the funny and the somber, and he passed from one to the other with such remarkable swiftness that it stunned the persons around. At one

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Melancholy is often the word used to describe Abraham Lincoln's personality. Yet the long and lanky 16th President of the United States had a keen sense of humor

moment he was wrapped in gloom, and at another showed all his white teeth and laughed. This transition from mood to mood was perceptively recorded by Andrew D. White, a member of the New York State Senate: "As he came toward us in a sort of awkward perfunctory way his face seemed to me one of the saddest I had ever seen, and when he had reached us he held out his hand to the first stranger, then to the second and so on all with the air of melancholy automation.

But suddenly someone in the company said something which amused him and instantly there came in his face a most marvelous transformation. 1 have never seen anything like it in any human being.

His features were lighted, his eyes radiant, he responded to sundry remarks humorously, then dryly, and thenceforward was cordial and hearty."

Perhaps laughter with Lincoln was a safety device to drain out the tensions that overflowed his mind. When, only a day after the horrors of the Battle of Fredericksburg, Lincoln read examples of humor from Artemus Ward to the Congressman Isaac N. Arnold, the shocked Arnold retorted: "Mr. President, is it possible that with the whole land bowed in sorrow and covered with a pall in the presence of yesterday's fearful reverse, you can indulge in such levity?"

Lincoln laid down the Artemus Ward book, and with tears rolling down his cheeks, answered in quivering tone: "Mr. Arnold, if I could not get momentary respite from the crushing burden I am constantly carrying, my heart would break." It grew clear to Arnold that Lincoln's laughter was only a cover to camouflage the profound pain that corroded his heart, a cure for his drooping spirits.

The greatest single factor that defined Lincoln's humor was its anecdotal character. He told stories. Midstream in conversation or some transaction he would burst forth, "this reminds me of...," and then narrate the humorous story with extraordinary skill to his rapt audience.

On a certain occasion, a friend asked him

if he was disturbed by the harsh criticism which some of his enemies directed against him, Lincoln instantly came out with the story of a big fellow whose little wife beat him over the head while he made no attempt to stop her. When his friend remarked that he was a fool to let her do it, he turned to him and said, "Let her alone. It doesn't hurt me but it does her a lot of good."

When on another occasion all the members of his Cabinet but one were opposed to him, Lincoln told a funny story of a drunken member of the church congregation who was in deep sleep when the preacher asked, "Who are on the Lord's side?" The entire audience except him rose to signify approval. Then the preacher asked, "Who are on the side of the Devil?" All remained seated, but the drunkard awoke and rose to say, "I don't exactly understand the question but I'll stand by you, parson, to the last. But it seems to me that we're in a hopeless minority."

A story that Lincoln greatly enjoyed narrating related to two Quaker women who were talking about the Civil War leaders, Lincoln and Jefferson Davis.

"1 think Jefferson Davis will win," said one. "Why does thee think so?" asked the other. "Because Jefferson is a praying man." "But so is Abraham a praying man," said the other. "Yes," the first woman argued, "but the Lord will think Abraham is joking."

Lincoln's constant indulgence in storytelling earned him the title of "American Aesop" and since many of his stories sounded like jokes, he was often dubbed as a joker. Many joke books relating his stories appeared, bearing such titles as Old Abe s Jokes, Fresh from Abraham s Bosom, Wit at the White House, Anecdotes of A braham Lincoln, and so on.

Lincoln's own comment on his stories was: "Some of my stories are not so nice as they might be, but I tell you the truth when 1 say that a funny story, if it has the element of genuine wit, has the same effect on me that I suppose a good square drink of whiskey has on an old toper; it

puts new life into me."

However, it was rare that Lincoln indulged in story-telling for the sake of story-telling; the stories were told, as poet and author Carl Sandburg said, "to clinch an argument, to lay bare a fallacy, to disarm an antagonist" and as "labor-saving contrivances." One of the ilTitating problems that confronted Lincoln was that of deal ing with the office-seekers who pestered him every day. He even had a relevant story which went like this: While setting out for hunting, a king asked his minister if it would rain. The minister replied it would not. On the way to the forest, the king encountered a farmer on a jackass who warned him that it was going to rain. It did rain. The king sacked his minister and installed the farmer in his place. But he asked him how he could predict the rain. The falmer replied, "It's not me, it's my jackass. He puts his ear forward when it's going to be wet." The king now sacked the farmer and made his jackass his minister. Lincoln commented: "It was here that the king made a great mistake." "How so?" he was asked. He replied, "Why, ever since that time, every jackass wants an office."

Many of Lincoln's stories were directed at himself too. He could joke about himself as naturally and piercingly as about others. He often raised laughter at the expense of his own ungainly physical appearance. An illustration is Lincoln's story ofajackknife which he came to possess, told in his own inimitable way: "I was once accosted by a stranger who said, 'Excuse me, Sir, but I have an aJiicle which belongs to you.' 'How is that?' I asked considerably astonished.

The stranger took out a jackknife from his pocket. 'This knife,' said he, 'was placed in my hands some years ago, with the injunction that I was to keep it until I found a man homelier-looking than I am myself. I have carried it from that time to this: allow me to say, Sir, that you are fairly entitled to the property.'"

But it was not always that Lincoln's humor stemmed from his stories; oftentimes the bare responses in conversation

and ordinary reflections on trifles were weighted with wit and laughter. During the Civil War a minister said to Lincoln, "Let us have faith, Mr. President, that the Lord is on our side in this great struggle."

Responded Lincoln, "I am not at all concerned about that, for I know that the Lord is always on the side of right; but it is my constant anxiety and prayer that I and this nation may be on the Lord's side."

Even more ingenious is the following humorous utterance to a stranger: A gentleman driving along the Springfield road was accosted by Lincoln, who said, "Will you have the goodness to take my overcoat to town for me?" "With pleasure," replied the stranger, "but how will you get it again?" "Oh, very readily," replied Lincoln, "as I intend to remain in it."

When Lincoln was nominated for the presidency, biographers approached him for material concerning his early life. He replied, "Why, it is a great folly to attempt to make anything out of early life. It can be condensed into a single sentence, and that sentence you will find in [Thomas] Gray's Elegy, 'the short and simple annals of the poor.' " Lincoln was an unpretentious man.

Everything that he said or did had a biblical simplicity about it. In close proximity to this was another quality which distinguished his character and gave a unique coloring to his humor-his kindness. He was as sensitive to the feelings of others as he was desirous of creating laughter.

Recounting her family's past deeds, an old lady said to the President, "Sir, you must give me a colonel's commission for my son. I demand it not as favor, but as right." "Perhaps, Madam," replied Lincoln, "your family has done enough for the country. It is time to give somebody else a chance."

But if the occasion demanded, Lincoln could be stern, and he could turn on a bully with cutting rejoinders. Impatient of his continual demand for detailed reports of war, General McClellan sent him a sarcastic telegram, "Have just captured six cows. What shall I do with them?"

Lincoln wired back "Milk them."

Once when he was a struggling farmer in Illinois, he took a sack of grain to a mill whose proprietor did the job so lazily that it irritated the future President who remarked wearily, "I can eat that grain as fast as you are grinding it." "Indeed," retorted the miller, "and how long do you think you could keep that up?" "Until I starve to death," returned Lincoln forthwith.

A foreign diplomat chanced upon Lincoln polishing his shoes and he quipped, "I am astonished, Mr. President, to find you blacking your own shoes."

"Whose shoes do you shine?" was Lincoln's quick retort.

On one occasion when Lincoln was making a speech a heckler hollered, "Did I have to pay a dollar to see the ugliest man in the whole of U.S.A.?" Lincoln instantly rejoined, "Yes, Sir, I am afraid

you were charged a dollar for that privilege. But I have it for nothing. Thank you."

Lincoln did not receive any education in a college or a university. Yet he attained such excellence in the art of communication through the reading of the Bible and Shakespeare that few could excel him in creating humor through the sheer use of words. Once, of an argument of rival Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, he said in his unique style, "It was as thin as a homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had been starved to death."

Praising a certain historian, a man said, "It may be doubted whether any man or of our generation has plunged more deeply into the sacred font of learning.

"Yes, or come up drier," was Lincoln's response.

A good example of laughter created through the magic of words is his description of a certain lawyer: "He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas better than any man I ever met."

Some statesmen win our love, others our admiration, and still others our reverence. Lincoln is the one statesman who wins all the three together, and this because he blended in himself a keen love of jest with tragic sense of life.

D About the Author: B. G Tandon is a former professor and head of school of studies in English at Vikram University, U;jain.

Is This a Religious

War;'

continued/rom

between good and evil-it is not enough to premise it on the capacity of human choice.

That is too great a burden. Choice leads to unbelief or distraction or negligence or despair. What human beings really need is the certainty of truth, and they need to see it reflected in everything around them-in the cultures in which they live, enveloping them in a seamless fabric of faith that helps them resist the terror of choice and the abyss of unbelief. This need is what the Inquisitor calls the "fundamental secret of human nature." He explains: "These pitiful creatures are concerned not only to find what one or the other can worship, but to find something that all would believe in and worship; what is essential is that all may be together in it. This craving for community of worship is the chief misery of every man individually and of all humanity since the beginning of time."

This is the voice of fundamental ism. Faith cannot exist alone in a single person. Indeed, faith needs others for it to survive-and the more complete the culture of faith, the wider it is, and the more total its infiltration of the world, the better. It is hard for us to wrap our minds around this today, but it is quite clear from the accounts of the Inquisition and, indeed, of the religious wars that continued to rage in Europe for nearly three centuries, that many of the fanatics who burned human beings at the stake were acting out of what they genuinely thought were the best interests of the victims. With the power of the state, they used fire, as opposed to simple execution, because it was thought to be spiritually cleansing. A few minutes of hideous torture on earth were deemed a small price to pay for helping such souls avoid eternal torture in the afterlife. Moreover, the example of such government-sponsored executions helped create a culture in which certain truths were reinforced and in which it was easier for more weak people to find faith.

The burden of this duty to uphold the faith lay on the men required to torture, persecute and murder the unfaithful. And many of them believed, as no doubt some Islamic fundamentalists believe, that they were acting out of mercy and godliness.

page 43

This is the authentic voice of the Taliban.

It also finds itself replicated in secular form.

What, after all, were the totalitarian societies of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia if not an exact replica of this kind of fusion of politics and ultimate meaning? Under Lenin's and Stalin's rules, the imminence of salvation through revolutionary consciousness was in perpetual danger of being undermined by those too weak to have faith-the bourgeois or the kulaks or the intellectuals. So they had to be liquidated or purged. Similarly, it is easy for us to dismiss the Nazis as evil, as they surely were. It is harder for us to understand that in some twisted fashion, they truly believed that they were creating a new dawn for humanity, a place where all the doubts that freedom brings could be dispelled in a rapture of racial purity and destiny. Hence the destruction of all dissidents and the Jews-carried out by fire as the Inquisitors had before, an act of purification different merely in its scale, efficiency and Godlessness.

erhaps the most important thing for us to realize today is that the defeat of each of these fundamentalisms required a long and arduous effort. The conflict with Islamic fundamental ism is likely to take as long. For unlike Europe's religious wars, which taught Christians the futility of fighting to the death over something beyond human understanding and so immune to any definitive resolution, there has been no such educative conflict in the Muslim world.

Only Iran and Afghanistan have experienced the full horror of revolutionary fundamentalism, and only Iran has so far seen reason to moderate to some extent. From everything we see, the lessons Europe learned in its bloody history have yet to be absorbed within the Muslim world. There, as in 16th-century Europe, the promise of purity and salvation seems far more enticing than the mundane allure of mere peace.

That means that we are not at the end of this conflict but in its very early stages.

The critical link between Western and Middle Eastern fundamentalism is surely the pace of social change.

The question of religious fundamentalism was not only familiar to the founding fathers, in many ways, it was the central question that led to America's existence.

America is not a neophyte in this struggle.

The United States has seen several waves of religious fervor since its founding. But American evangelicalism has always kept its distance from governmental power. The Christian separation between what is God's and what is Caesar's-drawn from the Gospels-helped restrain the fundamentalist temptation. The last few decades have proved an exception, however. As modernity advanced, and the certitudes of fundamentalist faith seemed mocked by an increasingly liberal society, evangelicals mobilized and entered politics. Their faith sharpened, their zeal intensified, the temptation to fuse political and religious authority beckoned more insistently.

Mercifully, violence has not been a significant feature of this trend-but it has not been absent. The murders of abortion providers show what such zeal can lead to. And indeed, if people truly believe that abortion is the same as mass murder, then you can see the awful logic of the terrorism it has spawned.

This is the same logic as bin Laden's. If faith is that strong, and it dictates a choice between action or eternal damnation, then violence can easily be justified. In retrospect, we should be amazed not that violence has occurred-but that it hasn't occurred more often.

The critical link between Western and Middle Eastern fundamentalism is surely the pace of social change. If you take your beliefs from books written more than a thousand years ago, and you believe in these texts literally, then the appearance of the modern world must truly terrifY. If you believe that women should be consigned to polygamous, concealed servitude, then Manhattan must appear like GomOlTah. If you believe that homosexuality is a crime punishable by death, as both fundamentalist Islam and the Bible dictate, then a world of same-sex marriage is surely Sodom. It is not a big step to argue that such centers of evil should be destroyed or undennined, as bin Laden does, or to believe that their destruction is somehow a consequence oftheir sin, as Jerry Falwell argued. Look again at Falwell's now infamous words in the wake of September 11: "I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), People for the American

Way-all of them who have tried to secularize America-I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.'"

And why wouldn't he believe that? He has subsequently apologized for the insensitivity of the remark but not for its theological underpinning. He cannot repudiate the theologybecause it is the essence of what he believes in and must believe in for his faith to remain alive.

he other critical aspect of this kind of faith is insecurity. American fundamentalists know they are losing the culture war. They are terrified of failure and of the Godless world they believe is about to engulf or crush them. They speak and think defensively. They talk about renewal, but in their private discourse they expect damnation for an America that has lost sight of the fundamentalist notion of God. Similarly, Muslims know that the era of Islam's imperial triumph has long since gone.

For many centuries, the civilization of Islam was the center of the world. It eclipsed Europe in the Dark Ages, fostered great learning and expanded territorially well into Europe and Asia. But it has all been downhill from there.

From the collapse of the Ottoman Empire onward, it has been on the losing side of history. The response to this has been an intermittent flirtation with Westernization but far more emphatically a reaffirmation of the most irredentist and extreme forms of the culture under threat. Hence the odd phenomenon of Islamic extremism beginning in earnest only in the last 200 years.

With islam, this has worse implications than for other cultures that have had rises and falls. For Islam's religious tolerance has always been premised on its own power. It was tolerant when it controlled the territory and called the shots. When it lost territory and saw itself eclipsed by the West in power and civilization, tolerance evaporated. To cite Lewis again on Islam: "What is truly evil and unacceptable is the domination of infidels over true believers. For true believers to rule misbelievers is proper and natural, since this provides for the maintenance of the holy law and gives the misbelievers both the opportunity and the incentive to embrace the true faith.

But for misbelievers to rule over true believers is blasphemous and unnatural, since it leads to the corruption of religion and morality in society and to the flouting or even the abrogation of God's law."

Thus the horror at the establishment of the State of Israel, an infidel country in Muslim lands, a bitter reminder of the eclipse of Islam in the modern world.

Thus also the revulsion at American bases in Saudi Arabia. While colonial ism of different degrees is merely political oppression for some cultures, for Islam it was far worse. It was blasphemy that had to be avenged and countered.

I cannot help thinking of this defensiveness when [ read stories of the suicide bombers sitting poolside in Florida or racking up a $48 vodka tab in an American restaurant. We tend to think that this assimilation into the West might bring Islamic fundamentalists around somewhat, temper their zeal. But in fact, the opposite is the case. The temptation of American and Western culture-indeed, the very allure of such culture-may well require a repression all the more brutal if it is to be overcome. The transmission of American culture into the heart of what bin Laden calls the Islamic nation requires only two responses-eapitulation to unbelief or a radical strike against it. There is little room in the fundamentalist psyche for a moderate accommodation. The very psychological dynamics that lead repressed homosexuals to be viciously homophobic or that entice sexually tempted preachers to inveigh against immorality are the very dynamics that lead vodka-drinking fundamentalists to steer planes into buildings. It is not designed to achieve anything, construct anything, argue anything. It is a violent acting out of internal conflict.

And America is the perfect arena for such acting out. For the question of religious fundamentalism was not only familiar to the founding fathers. In many ways, it was the central question that led to America's existence. The first American immigrants, after all, were refugees from the religious wars that engulfed England and that intensified

under England's Taliban, Oliver Cromwell. One central influence on the founders' political thought was John Locke, the English liberal who wrote the now famous "Letter on Toleration." In it, Locke argued that true salvation could not be a result of coercion, that faith had to be freely chosen to be genuine and that any other interpretation was counter to the Gospels. Following Locke, the founders established as a central element of the new American order a stark separation of church and state, ensuring that no single rei igion could use political means to enforce its own orthodoxies.

e cite this as a platitude today without absorbing or even realizing its radical nature in human history-and the deep human predicament it was designed to solve. It was an attempt to answer the eternal human question of how to pursue the goal of religious salvation for ourselves and others and yet also maintain civil peace. What the founders and Locke were saying was that the ultimate claims of religion should simply not be allowed to interfere with political and religious freedom. They did this to preserve peace above all-but also to preserve true religion itself.

The security against an American Taliban is therefore relatively simple: it's the Constitution. And the surprising consequence of this separation is not that it led to a collapse of religious faith in America-as weak human beings found themselves unable to believe without social and political reinforcement-but that it led to one of the most vibrantly religious civil societies on earth. No other country has achieved this. And it is this achievement that the Taliban and bin Laden have now decided to challenge. It is a living, tangible rebuke to everything they believe in.

That is why this coming conflict is indeed as momentous and as grave as the last major conflicts, against Nazism and

communism, and why it is not hyperbole to see it in these epic terms. What is at stake is yet another battle against a religion that is succumbing to the temptation Jesus refused in the desert-to rule by force. The difference is that this conflict is against a more formidable enemy than Nazism or communism. The secular totalitarianisms of the 20th century were, in President Bush's memorable words, "discarded lies." They were fundamentalisms built on the very weak intellectual conceits of a master race and a communist revolution.

But Islamic fundamentalism is based on a glorious civilization and a great faith. It can harness and co-opt and corrupt true and good believers if it has a propitious and toxic enough environment.

It has a more powerful logic than either Stalin's or Hitler's Godless ideology, and it can serve as a focal point for all the other societies in the world, whose resentment of Western success and civilization comes more easily than the arduous task of accommodation to modernity.

We have to somehow defeat this without defeating or even opposing a great religion that is nonetheless extremely inexperienced in the toleration of other ascendant and more powerful faiths. It is hard to underestimate the extreme delicacy and difficulty of this task.

In this sense, the symbol of this conflict should not be Old Glory, however stirring it is. What is really at issue here is the simple but immensely difficult principle of the separation of politics and religion. We are fighting not for our country as such or for our flag. We are fighting for the universal principles of our Constitution-and the possibility of free religious faith it guarantees. We are fighting for religion against one of the deepest strains in religion there is. And not only our lives but our souls are at stake.

0 About the Author: Andrew Sullivan is a former editor of The New Republic and now a regular contributor to the ew York Times Magazine and Book Review among other magazines. He manages a successjitl-and controversial-Web log, <www.andrewsullivan. com>.

ist Saturday evening and the Embassy duty officer gets a call about a U.S. citizen who has fallen and broken his neck. Thanks to the sharp work of the duty officer, the U.S. citizen is brought to Apollo Hospital in New Delhi where he will receive excellent medical treatment. Immediately, the consular officer who handles American Citizens Services '(ACS) is contacted. She finds out the details, including the condition of the American, his passport number and emergency contact information.

After speaking with local police and hospital officials, she calls his family in the U.S. to tell them the bad news. During the course of coming weeks, the Consular Section will handle numerous details for this helpless American who was criti'cally injured.

Fortunately, the American survives but his prognosis is not good. The Embassy helps his family with arrangements to come to India and visits him at the hospital as well.

The Embassy plays an active role in helping the family sort out a myriad of details relating to their son's condition once they arrive in India. After a couple of grueling weeks, the doctors determine the injured American is stable enough to leave India. The

I

Embassy then helps the family make arrangements for a medical evacuation. This is an extremely expensive proposition but fortunately the family has special insurance that will cover much of the expense. With medical escorts in place, the American is safely evacuated back to the U.S. where he will continue his treatment close to his family and friends.

This is not an uncommon case. In India, there are many sad stories like this. Americans in India experience a gamut of problems-from lost or stolen passports to getting robbed or even arrested.

Americans are encouraged to register with the Consular Section when they are in India. That way, should the Embassy need to reach them in an emergency or need to get in touch with their family members, it can know how to find them.

The Embassy Web site even allows Americans to register online without having to come to the Embassy. It is hoped most U.S. citizens will not experience anything as serious as the poor man who broke his neck did but help is there from the U.S. Embassy when necessary.

D About the Author: Nyda Budig is the chief of American Citizens Services (ACS) in the American Embassy, New Delhi.

To register online, use the Web at

usembassy. state.gov /posts/i nI/wwwhareg.html

The non-immigrant visa (NIV) Web appointment system, which was introduced at the American Embassy in New Delhi last November, has been extended to the Chennai Consulate as well effective from February 13.

Beginning March 4, the appointment system is mandatory for all NIV applicants, those applying for a visa either for the purpose of business, tourism, studies or exchange visitors' program.

The Web appointment system allows the applicant choice of convenient interview date and eliminates long queues.

Applicants from the South Zone, comprising Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, may make their appointments through their travel agent or by logging on to www.ttsvisas.com. For further details, contact TT Services on phone at 044-4357145 (Chennai), 080-5550111/2 (Bangalore) or 040-3231615 (Hyderabad).

Buddhist deity on illuminated Pala manuscript of Nepalese origin, c. 1138; San Diego Museum of Art.

Abul Fazal discusses the translation of the Mahabharata into Persian with Muslim and Hindu scholars, pape/; Emperor Akbar:S period, late 16th-early 17th century; Free Library of Philadelphia.

Photographs

by BENOY K. BEHL

is akin to nirvana, or the final bliss."

Nirvana is not our everyday reality, but ati can give us a glimpse: "If art puts you, even for a fleeting moment in contact with it, you can understand how impotiant it is. The purpose of the atiist, the duty of the at1ist, the expectation from the at1ist is that he has given to you, for that fleeting moment, a touch of eternity."

Thousands of guidelines set down in ancient texts describe how to do this and achieve results as subtle as conveying the movement of leaves in the breeze. The effect of such works, when they are in one's environment, can be very beneficial. "The important thing," Behl says, "is that the paintings have to be made with an understanding of the harmony of life. Without that essential understanding, they are meaningless."

Marveling at this ideal, he observes, "We are not talking about a system where there is a master or genius once in a while, we are talking about a widespread tradition of masters."

Can that be carried across the seas?

Maybe. "When things are taken out of the context they still can contribute a lot, but I hope that in these cultures people will look a little deeper and move into the context," since paintings, whether they are Tanjore, tribal or Buddhist, have their own patiicular aesthetic principle.

Behl fears people are losing the ability to be moved by art in a deep, spiritual way. "People no longer seem to sense and respond to a fine work of art." He adds, "It should actually come from the heat1 immediately. One should not really need to study." Can we regain this lost innocence? "Look at what is the sense of harmony to keep us in touch with the essential things. Not to respond to at1 and natural things, I think that's a great loss for humanity." Thanks to his sensibility, those lucky enough to see Behl's work may well be struck with his same sense of awe.

-L.T.