Mike's drumbeats: Are you Going to San Francisco?

One day last week, I was sitting in Dallas experiencing the lowest temperatures I can ever remember--13 degrees!

Two days later, I was introspectively standing in a dark forest of towering redwoods, then a few hours later I was standing on a cliff overlooking San Francisco and the golden gate bridge. I'm in town by myself for my job, and there are already a ton of stories that can be told, starting with sitting in the waiting area for the plane, just absolutely convinced that I was going to be crammed up against the huge, sweaty, fat guy scarfing down the garlic and limburger pork sandwich.

On the plane ride over, I watched Casablanca for the 20th time, and challenged myself to not get choked up a certain scene that always "gets me". Sure enough, it got me again and I was embarrassed to get emotional (I'm sure no one noticed the lump in my throat) in front of total strangers.

The scene is the part where the German officers take over the piano at the bar and sing a gloating, dark war hymn--Victor Laslow becomes enraged by this, and, casting fear aside, risks his life and leads the band to play Le Marsailles in a "round" fashion, overpowering the Germans and igniting the bar to stand up proudly with him. I guess I'm a sucker for patriotism and symbolism--the idea of standing up and being counted for what you stand for always strikes a chord with me...

I'm a little stifled in my writing, though, because I'm typing on my laptop keyboard--normally, I utterly pound the hell out of a keyboard that I attach--I really like springy keys that fight back!

I read a book review in the San Francisco Chronicle, about a book by Rebecca Lemov called World as Laboratory. I consider myself somewhat of a hack behavioral psychologist, just meaning here that I try to look a little deeper at people's motivations and make practical applications of what I know of psychology. One very interesting study to me whas done by Stanley Milgram in the '60's and it was profiled in this book--I actually watched an old, black and white documentary film on this study while I was in college. The study sets up a situation where a subject believes he iss giving near-lethal electrical shocks to another person by pressing a series of buttons. Many of the subjects refused to stop because a supervisor kept demanding that they continue, even though the other person cries out in pain very loudly each time a button is pressed--it is eye-opening, and was used to gain insight to some of the cruelty of the Holocaust. I guess I have Nazi's on my mind these days, huh?

But the chilling item that surprised me in this book was a description of behavioral studies conducted by the US military in the field of mind control--subjecting soldiers to sensory deprivation and mind-altering drugs--very similar to the treatments shown in The Manchurian Candidate (I really liked both movies for different reasons--haven't gotten to the book yet). The fact is that I believe I am acquainted with one of these subjects--I know him on a certain level through a friend. He was awarded many medals for valor including three purple hearts, and he has told a couple of people that there are things that he participated in for the military that won't come out until after his death--he described some of the experimental conditions, but not as though he was bragging, but just as an experience. I know he has been through a lot of trauma, and, according to his brother, he was a rational, kind, compassionate person before going to war in the '60's and '70's. Now, he is a mess, mentally unstable, constantly in trouble, and is practically destitute, but still powerful enough to scare the hell out of his family by zoning out and standing in the middle of the house with a loaded gun, as well as getting arrested for cutting a guy with a knife--over fifty times (it was a flesh wound (?)). In a bizarre series of occurrences, my wife and I ended up giving him a ride in our car and I kept envisioning headlines of our bodies being discovered somewhere--of course he behaved himself completely, and I have pity on him. I wonder what the result of the study was--was it worth sacrificing this guy's life?

I was standing in a convention center today with 10,000 people from all over the world scurrying by, and I was suddenly greeted warmly by a friend of mine, Victor, who is originally from Russia. I haven't seen him in two years--he spotted me across the room and came running up to me and gave me a big hug, saying "I'm so happy to see you, Mike! I'm so glad you are here!" How often does something so positive and affirming happen? My friend now lives in the outskirts of London and has invited my wife and me for a stay--perhaps in a couple of years we will take him up on it...

My friend and I got to know each other by discussing Russian literature all the time when he lived in Dallas. I love the Russians' dry sense of humor and irony (Victor tells me that, any time you take a boat out in Russia, you always bring a spare motor because you know the first one is going to go out, and at least you have a chance that the second one may start...). If you have ever read Doctor Zhivago or anything by Dostoevsky (my favorite is Crime and Punishment, but I had 3 "false starts" before the book caught hold with me), you will know exactly what I mean by this attitude coming across beautifully and hilariously in literature.

Victor asked me one time about a scene he observed in an American grocery store--he went to the store in the evening, and one of the clerks was piling bread into a cart to throw out--Victor thought that surely this was not possible, and that they were sending it to another store or something--I assured him that they were throwing it out, and that they probably did it every night. People in America won't buy bread that is old--this absolutely blew his mind and actually made him pretty angry. I remember that an Indian man who worked in the law office with Fran actually had to go get counseling when he went to college in the US because of all the food that was thrown away each day in the lunchroom where he worked.