Remembering the Permanent Opposition of H. L. Mencken

December 30, 2002

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG


Every generation needs a Mencken. Not H. L. Mencken proper, reincarnated in all his old prejudices, but an observer as critical of the provinciality and double standards of the moment as Mencken was of those in his own time. This is the man who lies at the heart of Terry Teachout's new biography, called, appropriately, "The Skeptic." Mencken's peak came in the 1920's, a decade when America seemed to awake out of a lilac and camphor scented daydream into a more vigorous and honest sense of what life was all about. Some of that was Mencken's doing. He did everything he could to discredit the oppressive pieties of his time, many of which enjoy renewed strength today. He loved a foe almost better than a friend. He had more opinions than he knew how to organize, which made self-contradiction inevitable, and he did not believe in keeping his opinions down for the sake of mere consistency.

Mencken began as a Baltimore reporter, but it wasn't long before he realized that his true calling was to blow up the false fronts on Main Street and stand laughing over the rubble. The brash sound of his voice in newspaper columns and in magazines like The Smart Set and The American Mercury was one of the things that helped America wake up as the First World War ended and the country began to shake off its wartime hysteria. To attack Mencken for being "merely" critical is a little like assailing Jonathan Swift for being merely satirical. America has always been full of what Swift, in "Gulliver's Travels," called "projectors"— systematizers, theoreticians, political idealists, men and women who build cathedrals of thought and supposed morality on sandbars in a shifting river. Those people, if not criminals themselves, make good cover for the actual swindlers at work among them. Mencken made it his job to denounce the ones who were current in his time, to denounce their followers, and to do so in a way that left his phrases ringing in your ears. Swift had Laputa, and Mencken had Moronia, which was the name he sometimes used for the country he lived in. Mencken once wrote that his principal business was manufacturing "ideas so novel that they will be instantly rejected as insane and outrageous by all right-thinking men, and so apposite and sound that they will eventually conquer that instinctive opposition, and force themselves into the traditional wisdom of the race." He confessed that most of his platitudes were "rescued from the cobwebbed shelves of yesterday, with new labels stuck rakishly upon them." But his original assessment was the right one. He described himself once as being in "permanent opposition," and yet certain parts of the American population swung so quickly toward his way of thinking in the 1920's that he found himself suddenly in agreement with them, or, rather, they with him. It didn't last for long.

What America heard from Mencken in his heyday wasn't really ideas at all. It was reactions, the pungent and sometimes foolish observations of a man who had no hesitation in saying that the book of Genesis revealed the kind of mind "one encounters today among New York wash-room attendants, Mississippi newspaper editors, and Tennessee judges." Mencken was comically intemperate, and he wielded the English language with an accuracy and a brutality that make for breathless reading nowadays. He was deeply flawed by anti-Semitism, which he passed off all too unforgivably as a conventional motif in his social criticism. For that he deserves no indulgence. He also engages in other kinds of name-calling that have been banished from civil discourse. But then it would be worth hearing Mencken on the forces that shape civil discourse in our own time. His contempt for organized idiocy was real, and beneath the sting of it there was often a point worth hanging on to. He loathed Christian Science, and yet he wrote, "the moment a Christian Scientist begins to lose an essential liberty, then all the rest of us begin to lose ours."

Swift had only the orthodoxy of his faith to temper the savagery of his skepticism. Mencken had no such thing. He was, as Time magazine called him not long before his death, the "village atheist." He would have admitted the atheism but rejected the village. Nearly everyone who comes across Mencken sooner or later tries to get to the nub of his faith, assuming that under such dauntless campaigning against stupidity and lies there must be a solid core of conviction. That doesn't really work with Mencken. He once described himself as "a skeptic as to all ideas, including especially my own." If he believed in anything, it was the essential liberties, and those are what he stood up for again and again, if often in contradictory ways.

Mr. Teachout argues that Mencken posed "as a nihilistic conservative," an inherently absurd position that "stands in the way of his being taken seriously as a political philosopher." But Mencken doesn't need to be taken seriously as a political philosopher. He needs to be taken as what he was, a brilliant observer and writer whose language still snarls and bites and laughs out loud. Mr. Teachout worries more than once about Mencken's "wide-ranging but unsystematic self-education," but that's the only kind that life itself happens to offer. If Mencken's education had been systematic he wouldn't have been Mencken, any more than Twain would have been Twain without the Mississippi. To speak the truth about what you see as consistently - and as inconsistently - as Mencken did, even about the notion of the truth itself, is a gift that comes to very few humans.

JAY OGILVY AND LEARNING & EVOLUTION
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From "Creating Better Futures: scenario planning as a tool for a better tomorrow" James A. Ogilvy 2002 Oxford University Press pp. 57-58

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The likeness between learning and evolution

"...Learning is a process of adaptation to ones environment, a process of trial and error, a process of perpetual innovation (metaphorical mutation) followed by the selection of what is most fitting to a particular environmental niche, a process of testing the affordances of different niches and differentially reproducing those innovations which the niche can best afford ... and here the language of learning and evolution drifts ever closer to the economic language of the marketplace.

Getting smart -- whether in education or in marketing -- is a matter of learning what works. Species do it, kids do it, and so must corporations and communities. It is the job of strategic planners to facilitate the process of evolutionary learning through strategic conversations among many members of a corporation and between the corporation and the stakeholders in the community. By pressing the relationship between scenario planing and strategy, we learn the language of this conversation needs to be better balanced: more biological, less exclusively mechanistic; more psychological than purely rationalist; more metaphorical, less literal; qualitative as well quantitative; more ecological, less military."

CLIFFORD GEERTZ - COMMON SENSE AS AN ORGANIZED BODY OF THOUGHT

From "Local Knowledge: further essays on interpretive anthropology" Clifford Geertz, Basic Books, NY NY 1983 - article: Common Sense as A Cultural System pp. 73-93

There are a number of reasons why treating common sense as a relatively organized body of considered thought, rather than just what anyone clothed and in his right mind knows, should lead on to some useful conclusions; but perhaps the most important is that it is an inherent characteristic of common-sense thought precisely to deny this and to affirm that its tenets are immediate deliverances of experience, not deliberated reflections upon it. Knowing that rain wets and that one ought to come in out of it, or that fire burns and one ought not to play with it (to stick to our own culture for a moment) are conflated into comprising one large realm of the given and undeniable, a catalog of in-the-grain-of-nature realities so preemptory as to force themselves upon any mind sufficiently unclouded to receive them. Yet this is clearly not so. No one, or no one functioning very well, doubts that rain wets; but there may be some people ar9ound who question the proposition that one out to come in out of it, holding that it is good for one's character to brave the elements -- hatlessness is next to godliness. And the attractions of playing with fire often, with some people usually, override the full recognition of the pain that will result. Religion rests its case on revelation, science on method, ideology on moral passion; but common sense rests its on the assertion that is not a case at all, just life in a nutshell. The world is its authority. P. 75

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Common sense has features

* It seems 'natural' - an air of "of course-ness" a sense of "it figures" - intrinsic, the way things go (p 85)

* It seems 'practical' - to tell someone to be 'sensible' is less to tell him to cling to the utilitarian than to tell him, as we say, to wise up: to be prudent, levelheaded, keep his eye on the ball, not buy any wooden nickels, stay way from slow horses and fast women, let the dead bury the dead. (p 86)

* It seems 'thin' Thinness is, like modesty in cheese, rather hard to formulate in more explicit terms. "Simpleness" or even "literal-ness" might serve as well or better, for what is involved is the tendency for common sense views of this matter or that to represent them as being precisely what they seem, neither more nor less. This world is what the wide-awake, uncomplicated person takes it to be. Sobriety, not subtlety, realism, not imagination, are the keys to wisdom; the really important facts of life lie scattered openly along its surface, not cunningly secreted in its depths. There is no need, indeed it is a fatal mistake, to deny as poets, intellectuals, priests, and other professional complicators of the world so often do, the obviousness of obvious. Truth is as plain, as the Dutch proverb has it, as a pikestaff over water. (pp 88-89)

* It seems 'without method' - common sense caters to the pleasures of inconsistency which are so very real to any but the most scholastical of men. Common-sense wisdom is shamelessly and unapologetically ad hoc. (p 90)

* It seems 'accessible' - this follows from those proceeding. The assumption, in fact the insistence, that any person with faculties reasonably intact can grasp common-sense conclusions, and indeed, once they are unequivocally enough stated, will not only grasp but embrace them. ... Its tone is even anti-expert, if not anti-intellectual: we reject, and so, as far as I can see, do other peoples, any explicit claim to special powers in this regard. There is no esoteric knowledge, no special technique or peculiar giftedness, and little or no specialised training -- only what we rather redundantly call experience and rather mysteriously call maturity -- involved.

A Holiday Made for Believing
The New York Times, December 25, 2002
By JOHN HORGAN (GARRISON, N.Y. )

I think I finally understand the attraction of Christmas. Actually, my wife deserves the credit. Three years ago she decided that our family should celebrate winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, which falls a few days before Christmas. To be honest, I wasn't eager to cram another event into our frantic holiday schedule. As a lapsed Catholic, I had a knee-jerk aversion toward rituals and other trappings of religion, whether Christianity or voodoo.

Nevertheless, an hour or so after nightfall on Dec. 21, I dutifully pulled on my coat and boots and skidded down our icy driveway and into a field bordering our property. Near a clump of skeletal trees on the field's far side, I found a circle of stones enclosing a heap of sticks, which my wife and kids had gathered earlier that day. With the help of a chunk of artificial kindling, several sheets of newspaper and a dozen matches, I got the sticks burning, just before I spotted the candle lanterns of my wife and two children bobbing toward me. We were only out there half an hour or so. The night was thumpingly cold, and smoke kept blowing in our faces. My son and daughter were more interested in putting sticks into the fire than in listening to their parents' makeshift creation stories about the Man on the Moon and other celestial beings. My daughter, then four years old, singed her hair, and the tip of her mitten melted. Glancing up at the stars and full moon, I felt anew that ancient sense of wonder at the improbability of life. This was not exactly news to me. As a science journalist, I knew that scientists don't have a clue how our universe came into being, or why it took this particular form out of an infinitude of possibilities, including nonexistence. Nor does anyone know how inanimate matter on our little planet coalesced into living creatures, let alone creatures that could invent reality TV. Science, you might say, has discovered that our existence is infinitely improbable, and hence a miracle.

It is one thing to know intellectually that life is a miracle. It's quite another, however, to see it. Saints and poets aside, most of us rarely do. The psychiatrist Arthur Deikman blames our pinched perception on two innate tendencies, which he calls instrumentality and automatization. Instrumentality is our compulsion to view the world through the filter of our selfish interests. Automatization is our propensity to learn tasks so thoroughly that we perform them with little or no conscious thought.

No doubt these traits have helped us survive. Automatization is a particularly attractive cognitive feature, because it allows us to carry out more than one task at the same time; we can fret over our plummeting 401(k)'s while driving our children to their school Christmas concert. But instrumentality and automatization can also cause us to sleepwalk through much of life. Yet now and then, we do not see the world as something to be manipulated for our ends. This recognition, which Dr. Deikman calls deautomatization, is the goal of all contemplative traditions. When an aspirant asked the 15th-century Zen master Ikkyu to write down a maxim of "the highest wisdom," Ikkyu wrote one word: "Attention." The dissatisfied aspirant asked, "Is that all?" This time, Ikkyu wrote two words: "Attention. Attention." Spiritual practices such as meditation, yoga and prayer can help us pay attention. So can art, poetry and music. And so can religious rituals. This, I suspect, is why so many people who aren't otherwise religious still celebrate holidays like Christmas and Hanukkah. We especially need these rituals in this most benighted of seasons, when we are prone to dwelling on life's darker aspects.

The bugbear haunting Christianity and other faiths is the problem of evil. But sitting with my family in that circle of stones on winter solstice helped me see that birth, beauty, love and laughter also pose a problem. How could all this have come about? It's a mystery, which no theory or theology can possibly dispel.

My family celebrates winter solstice every year now, along with Christmas and New Year's. Even when it's unseasonably mild, as it was four nights ago, I still look forward to returning to the warmth of our home and flipping through an album of photos from the year just past. Remember last winter when we visited Grandpa in Colorado, and your brother learned to snowboard and your sister got sick? Remember Harley the starling, who pestered the other birds in the aviary so much last summer that Mommy brought him in the house, where he drove Daddy crazy?

The kids may squabble over who gets to turn the pages. I'll brood over a deadline, or plot how I'm going to ditch the family tomorrow to play pond hockey. But for at least a moment I'll pay attention and see. I won't know who or what to thank, but I'll be grateful nonetheless.

John Horgan is author, most recently, of "Rational Mysticism: Dispatches from the Border Between Science and Spirituality."

Many a book is marketed as a recipe for success or a formula for inspirational change. But, it appears, some recipes for success and wellsprings of life-altering change are found in unlikely literary sources.

These days, Steve Kavalgian is the president of Mill River Media in Old Lyme, Connecticut. He's a publisher's representative, selling advertising space in journals of medicine and professional societies. Life, he says, is terrific. But a few years ago, in 1996, things weren't so good. Mr. Kavalgian had had a wonderful business in New York, also as a publisher's representative, for 16 years, but eventually, he says, "the bottom fell out."

"It may sound strange that a novel rather than a business text or how-to book was the help I used" in the aftermath, he writes. "I was depressed, concerned I wasn't going to make my mortgage payment, my son's college bills or even pay the most minor expenses," he says of that time. "On a business trip, I bought a paperback in an airport newsstand because the cover looked exciting. Here began the adventures of soldiers in Burma, Germany and Vietnam, fighting for their lives, covering each other's butts, dealing with military bureaucracy in an attempt to survive and go home. Here were men exhibiting courage in the face of death, exhibiting bravery in what seemed like impossible situations and exhibiting the strength to get the job done."

Mr. Kavalgian had discovered the novels of Leonard B. Scott, including "Charlie Mike," "The Last Run," "The Expendables," "Forged in Honor" and "The Iron Men." Mr. Kavalgian writes, "The characters in the stories showed me that even in the worst of scenarios, they could prevail, and so could I."

He took a series of jobs. He got one as a part-time pharmaceutical representative. He worked part-time for the United Parcel Service delivering packages. He started selling photographic equipment at camera shows, and he got a new journal client. "It all worked," he says. "I survived and came home."

Ben Friedell, a physician in Oneonta, N.Y., offers a prescription - one that changed the way he practices his profession.

It is "A Whole New Life" by Reynolds Price.

"He is a novelist and teacher of English at Duke University who developed a tumor on his spinal cord, which ultimately left him paraplegic and in constant pain," Dr. Friedell writes. "Yet he continues to teach and write, adapting to his new body to continue to do the things he loves. "I am a family physician who deals with many patients with chronic pain and physical disabilities, which challenge them. Price's story has given me, as an able-bodied person, an insight into the life of those with pain and disabilities.

"I recommend this book to anyone in the health professions." Poetry was the answer for Carol LaChapelle of Chicago.

"In 1985, while stuck in a hateful administrative job at a local university, I registered for a seminar in English literature at the Newberry Library in Chicago," Ms. LaChapelle writes. "I needed something uplifting and inspiring to keep me from quitting outright - never a good career move.

"The seminar focused on `Lyrical Ballads,' a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published in 1798.

"What I didn't know but learned during the eight-week class was how situated these poets were in the revolutionary times within which they wrote," Ms. LaChapelle writes. "England was in the midst of a massive cultural revolution, moving from an agricultural to an industrial economy. There were the American Revolution, of course, and the fall of the Bastille in 1789.

"Learning all this, seeing this revered poet, a laureate of England, as a young fired-up revolutionary, both politically and artistically," she says, referring to Wordsworth, "put me in mind of my own generation's coming of age in the 1960's. "But the most important thing I learned during that seminar, and the reading of the `Lyrical Ballads,' was of the quiet, yet insistent power of literature to connect the experience of a 20th-century American woman with that of a canonical male writer two centuries earlier.

"Six months later, I quit my job and returned to graduate school, at the age of 41, to study literature and writing. Since then, I have been self-employed as a writing teacher, offering seminars in various adult education venues, including the Newberry Library."

David M. Tenenbaum says, "Thanks, Tom Clancy." Mr. Tenenbaum says "a casual Christmas read" in 1985 - the paperback version of Mr. Clancy's "The Hunt for Red October" - "helped show me a way to stand on my own two feet, changed my career and changed the way thousands of people do their jobs."

Mr. Tenenbaum is now president and chief executive of MerlinOne Inc., based in Quincy, Mass. It provides systems that search for and retrieve digital photographs, graphics and other files for business needs. The company supplies more than 100 systems to 91 companies in 5 countries. But in the mid-1980's, Mr. Tenenbaum had been a staff photographer at The Associated Press for about 10 years. "My job typically entailed going somewhere involving a breaking news story, setting up a temporary darkroom, covering the story, processing the film and making a print of the best image," he writes.

"The print, with a typed caption, was inserted into a photo transmission device, which would translate various shades of gray to an audio tone of varying strength. The signal would be sent over a telephone line, usually to the A.P. office in New York, for retransmission to thousands of newspapers in the case of a major story."

The system had been in use for some 50 years. Transmitting a single black-and-white picture took eight minutes, and any noise on the phone line meant that it would have to be resent.

That was where Tom Clancy came in. In "The Hunt for Red October," he tells of a Navy sailor who uses a computer system to remove random noise so the sonar sounds of a submarine can be distinguished from a noisy environment. "It got me thinking," Mr. Tenenbaum writes. What if he built a system that could fool the telephone system into thinking it was receiving a constant signal rather than a disrupted one? He spent his nights building and testing prototypes. The A.P. and other news organizations bought them. He got a patent.

A few years later, he left to start his own company. His systems are now used by major news organizations.

Kenny Moore says his college philosophy professor made him read Dostoyevsky's "Brothers Karamazov" and told him it would change his life.

He did. It didn't.

That was more than 30 years ago, and though the professor insisted that the novel be read annually, "for insight and moral grounding," Mr. Moore, now the corporate ombudsman and director for human resources at the KeySpan Corporation in New York, says he has probably read it once since then. "I'm still left unmoved and morally ungrounded," he writes.

"Of greater value to me is the book `10 Fun Things to Do Before You Die,' by Karol A. Jackowski, a New York City nun with a sense of divine humor and sparkling insight. Over the past decade, I've regularly picked it up and found sound business advice, like No. 3, `Get some depth,' and No. 7, `Make yourself interesting.'

"Last year I had a heart attack and open-heart surgery - and almost died. I picked up Sister Karol's book and read it again. It made me smile, cry and helped me heal. I found humor in No. 2, `Get some insight' and hope in No. 10, `Live like you have nothing left to lose.'

"Had Fyodor Dostoyevsky had access to this book, I believe that the four Karamazov brothers would have fared a lot better than they did.

"Even former Enron executives would have found some helpful advice here, like No. 4: `Find a place to escape reality.' " Judith Steininger of Milwaukee says she owes it all to Martha Gellhorn.

"Gellhorn may be best known as the third wife of Ernest Hemingway, but that shortchanges this terrific writer of numerous first-rate short stories and seven novels," Mrs. Steininger writes.

So how did Martha Gellhorn change her life? It all started a couple of decades ago, when Mrs. Steininger's husband, Daniel, was a newly minted chief executive of an insurance company, "enduring the sleepless nights such awesome responsibility usually visits."

Mrs. Steininger continues: "Always looking for new material to introduce to my literature classes at the college where I taught, I closeted myself one day in the office with Gellhorn's novella `In the Highlands,' about a British survivor of a German concentration camp during World War II. He had purchased a farm in Kenya and was determined to be the world's greatest, kindest boss - an attitude similar to my husband's. But the survivor learned that just letting employees do what they want isn't always best for the business or relationships."

When she finished the book, Mrs. Steininger left it in her husband's study with what she calls "a you-gotta-read-this note." "I knew he'd find it about 2:30 a.m. He did, and he experienced the magic of narrative to complement the analysis of managerial books. Over the next few years, as I watched my husband grow into his job, I was amazed to discover numerous literary works that provided outstanding metaphors for business problems."

Before long, Mrs. Steininger was teaching a course called "The Business World Through the Eyes of Fiction" at the Milwaukee School of Engineering. The class explored contemporary writers , as well as early Americans like Horatio Alger. Then Mrs. Steininger dropped off a letter at The Business Journal of Milwaukee, proposing a monthly column on literature and business. Soon she was being invited to speak at companies and professional organizations. She talked about estate planning lessons from "King Lear" and Dr. Frankenstein on research and development.

"My time upon the world stage was brief," Mrs. Steininger says. "For budgetary reasons, the newspaper let me go. But people still remember. Periodically someone stops me and asks if I am the person who wrote that column called Shelf Life.

"I thank Martha Gellhorn from the bottom of my heart."

"Such was the calm produced in the Prince's mind by the political discoveries of that morning that he smiled at what would at other times have seemed to him gross impertinence. He opened one the windows of the little tower. The countryside spread below in all its beauty. Under the leaven of the strong sun everything seemed weightless; the sea in the background was a dash of pure colour, the mountains which had seem so alarmingly full of hidden men during the night now looked like masses of vapor on the point of dissolving, and grim Palermo itself lay crouching quietly around its monasteries like a flock of sheep around their shepherds. Even the foreign warships anchored in the harbour in case of trouble spread no sense of fear in the majestic calm. The sun, still far from its blazing zenith of that morning of the 13th of May, was
showing itself the true rule of Sicily; the crude brash sun, the drugging sun, which annulled every will, kept all things in servile immobility, cradled in violence and arbitrary dreams. (page 48)


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The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa: Knopf, 1958, 1960 1991, 300 pp.

For Art Basel Miami Beach, an art fair held this month, 20 shipping containers were refurbished and converted into
galleries by a Basel architectural firm, Steinmann & Schmid. The containers were lined with white wooden walls and
positioned along the beach at Collins Park (not far fromthe main exhibition at the Miami Beach Convention Center).
After the show closed, the containers were reused for their initial purpose, transporting exhibition materials back to
Switzerland.

Sunday December 15, 2002
New York Times Magazine

News That Glows

By CLIVE THOMPSON


The orb sits on your office desk and glows a quiet yellow. To a visitor, it might appear to be a slightly fey designer lamp, or perhaps a mutant night light. In reality, it's a financial tool: the orb changes colors to track the performance of your stocks. When the market is stable, it glows yellow; when stocks are soaring, it becomes increasingly green. And if it begins to fade into a deep scarlet? Better call your broker.

This is ''ambient information'' -- the newest concept in how to monitor everyday data. Normally, our digital tools are intrusive, constantly barging in to demand our attention with e-mail alerts, beeping instant messages and phone calls. The Ambient Orb, released this year by Ambient Devices, takes a different approach. It displays information that you take in subconsciously. Instead of blasting the news at you directly, it radiates it in the background.

''The point is, you don't need to keep checking into CNNfn all day long like a neurotic freak,'' says David Rose, the C.E.O. of Ambient Devices. ''You know implicitly what's going on, because the information is all around you.''

There are other technologies that bring you information in an ambient manner. Think of cellphones with personalized ring tones to let you know who's calling without checking the screen, or one of those minimalist wall clocks without numbers, where you tell the time only through the position of the hands. You give it the occasional glance, out of the corner of your eye, and it gives you a general sense of the time, rather than second-by-second precision.

Ambient information could go far beyond the stock market. An Orb could be configured to track your elderly mother's glucose level, letting you remotely monitor subtle shifts in her health. It could slowly turn green as the traffic on your route home eases up, helping you decide when to leave the office. The ultimate goal is to tame our information so it no longer frazzles. Instead, it creates ''calm and comfort,'' as the computer scientists Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown wrote in a prophetic 1996 paper on ambient information, ''The Coming Age of Calming Technology.''

Consider how counterintuitive this is. We've been cramming stock tips, horoscopes and news items onto our computers and cellphones -- forcing us to peer constantly at little screens. What if we've been precisely wrong? It's the new paradox of our data world. ''The way to become attuned to more information,'' Weiser and Brown noted, ''is to attend to it less."

The Roman architecture critic Vetrivius advanced the notion that well- designed buildings were those which exhibited firmness, commodity and delight. The same might be said of good software. Firmness: a program should not have any bugs which inhibit its function. Commodity: a program should be suitable for the purposes for which it was intended. Delight: the experience of using the program should be a pleasurable one. Here we have the beginnings of a theory of design for software.

Our story's protagonist: a road-weary business traveler, tired of too many nights in foreign hotel rooms, too many meals at restaurants highly recommended by concierges. En route from one meeting to another, he stops at a cafe in a small village. At a loss for choosing among the best known national dishes, he asks the proprietor to bring him what she usually has for lunch. The request is first met with a Gaelic shrug ... and only secondly by a waiter appearing with a plate of food. Assorted cheeses, a glass of wine, and some sautéed vegetables.

"Ah, rustic fare - serves me right," thinks the business traveler.

But ... what's amazing is just how wonderful the food is!

In the traveler's best attempt at the language, he asks the waiter where the cheeses are from. "See those sheep?" asks the somewhat bored waiter. "How about these vegetables?" is the next question from our traveler. "That field over there." "And the wine?" "Oh that, it's a local family that's made wine since before anyone could remember."