A Few More Words About Language

As most of you know, one of my ongoing concerns involves the loss of languages in the world: both in their spoken and written forms. So it shouldn't surprise anyone that the appearance on my radar of three separate projects within the last couple of weeks has sparked a post.

The first of these is another Kickstarter project created by Tim Brookes, who founded the Endangered Alphabets Project, with which I've been involved almost from the beginning. The last one, The Atlas of Endangered Alphabets (this is my post, with further links to posts about other projects), has been a rousing success, and has prompted Tim to launch a campaign to enable and promote his new Thank You All exhibition.

This latest effort was inspired by a type designer, Ananda K. Maharjan, who created a poster featuring an almost extinct Nepalese script, Ranjana, that says "Thank You All."

 
This project isn't progressing as quickly as it might, so if you're at all interested in helping, please go to the page and check out the (as always) lovely rewards. I've got several of Tim's carvings exhibited in my home and they always draw enthusiastic comments. But the main reason to support this project is to foster the survival of the scripts that are disappearing on an almost daily basis.

In the New York Times (wherein I first read about Tim's book Endangered Alphabets) this morning, I happened on another project involving linguistic extinction: languages themselves.

Lena Herzog, a photographer with broad interests and talents, has developed a multimedia exhibition called Last Whispers (an "Oratorio for Vanishing Voices, Collapsing Universes, and a Falling Tree"), which explores visually and aurally several of the 3,000 languages that are in danger of extinction. The presentation was created with the help of producer and composer Mark Capalbo, and sound designer Mark Mangini, who won an Oscar for Mad Max: Fury Road. The audio samples on the website are haunting, and the trailer is stunningly beautiful. Public screenings of the Oratorio will take place at Montclair State University October 16-20, with discussions and other events--so if you happen to live in New Jersey, it would be worth your while to check it out. Those of stranded in Texas can only hope there will be a Netflix production or an expansion of venues.

Reading Zachary Woolfe's Times article on Herzog also made me aware of a 2017 video by the artist/anthropologist Susan Hiller, called Lost and Found. This work, commissioned by the Pérez Art Museum in Miami, consists of an "audio collage" of voices speaking about the political and cultural importance of native languages--in twenty three of those that are extinct or endangered, and some of which are being revived. The visual component of the film features text translations of the material, and images of "a shifting oscilloscopic line" accompany the subtitles. A YouTube video of an hour-long discussion between PAMM's curator, René Morales and Hiller is available at the link. Slides from the video augment the conversation. It was actually somewhat heartening to hear that a few languages and dialects are enjoying revivals--such as Cornish and Welsh.

While I was still teaching, I was fond of reminding my students (many of whom were graphic designers) that writing is the graphic representation of language. Although there are many languages in the world that lack--or have until recently lacked--written alphabets or syllabaries, we know about some extinct languages only because they have, in the past, been represented by written symbols that correspond to the sounds of words. My students were always fascinated by Egyptian hieroglyphs, which wasn't deciphered until the turn of the eighteenth century, but opened up an entire universe of much more accurate information on ancient Egyptian life than had ever been available before. Much of my early interest in archaeology was sparked by my having read about Michael Ventris's decipherment of Mycenaean Linear B as an early form of Greek (and its mysterious relative, Minoan Linear A, which is still undeciphered), which I discovered during my initial forays into Attic Greek--which led me to the Homeric dialect I work on sporadically to this day.

The efforts of artists and designers, as well as linguists, to preserve languages and scripts offers some hope to those of us who lament the loss of language in any of its forms. I hope that the projects I've mentioned generate new interest in the ways we communicate, both visually and orally, because these cultural foundations are far more important than most people seem to realize. Being able to see the beautiful scripts and hear the haunting voices of people speaking languages some of us have never even heard of deepens our understanding of the world. It might even make us grateful that our own language and its almost infinite variety of forms is still alive and well.

As Tim Brookes reminds us with his Thank You All project,  "This is what the world needs right now: not suspicion and divisiveness and bigotry but gratitude and openness to everyone, everywhere." Language and literacy provide connections over time and space, and the more access we have to others' stories, the more able we might be to appreciate the world as a whole.

Then, perhaps, we might not be so complacent about its destruction.

Feeding and Clothing the Future

This is my final post on the Tikkun Olam (healing the world) project that began last week, and it's a difficult combination of topics to discuss. It's hard because the culinary arts and fashion design are both professions involved with basic needs, but both can also be seen as emblems of greed and excess (to many reformers, at least).

Mind you, I don't really teach culinary students much any more (except for the occasional graduating student in desperate need of an elective, and who thinks art history might be an easy grade), but some of my favorite former humanities students are now chefs, and the new BFA programs in fashion design and merchandising have meant an influx of students I'm not used to teaching. I've been enjoying them immensely, though, because they've so far proven bright, creative, and interested--and their superior grades have reflected these qualities.

Those who know me probably chortle at my having the chutzpah to discuss fashion, since my chief criterion for garments is comfort, and I'm not what you'd call a fashion maven. My priorities are such that clothing falls fairly far down on the great chain of being, although if I had my druthers (and a great deal more time) I'd make all my own out of sustainably harvested fibers woven and dyed (naturally) by well-paid garment workers in airy, pleasant surroundings.

And this is where the healing question comes in: why is it that Americans would rather pay bottom dollar for clothes and food whenever possible, despite the fact that the production of cheap food and clothing means that workers are exploited and the environment degraded in order to supply these markets? Food sustains us, clothing protects us, and both allow us to reflect our cultural affiliations and creativity, and yet we are extremely reluctant to pay real wages to the people who grow and harvest the basic materials. As Jubal Early would say (in the Firefly episode, "Objects in Space"), does that seem right to you?

While it's true that factory farms are raking in the dough and that high-dollar clothiers are rolling in it, most of the people who do the legwork (farmers, farm workers, stockers, cashiers, waiters, bussers, clerks, tailors, etc.) often do so for minimum wages or less, are seldom provided with insurance plans, and frequently work well beyond a forty-hour week. Some of these people are even experiencing situations that closely resemble slavery (see especially the information and links on the Alliance For Fair Food page). "The Working Poor" has become a buzzword, but the fact remains that too many of the people who work harder than the rest of us are paid much less and earn barely enough to survive.

I can't fix this, and neither can my students. But we can help by being much more mindful about how we use our talents and how we spend our money. We can, for example stop buying fast food altogether. We can eat less meat, and make sure what we do eat is humanely raised and killed and safely prepared, even if that means changing our eating and buying habits radically. For example, most of the world uses meat as a flavoring--not a honking great steak on a plate as the main course. A few bites of chicken in a well-prepared sauce heavy on the veg and eaten over a bowl of brown rice or other whole grain is not only more healthful, but pretty tasty as well. Cook up some rice to keep in the fridge for a couple of days, and you've got the basis for a number of quick meals that are better for you than stopping by McD's on the way home.

But "I can't," I hear my students say. "I can't live without meat." "I can't live without hamburgers." "I can't afford anything better." Baloney. Years ago, I lived (on purpose) for several months on a welfare mother's budget. It was another of my social experiments, designed to help me figure out what I need and what I merely want. Not only did I succeed, but my husband and son were better fed after I began to cook everything from scratch. When I began to grow some of my own fruit and veg, the repertoire expanded, and I managed to re-educate our tastes so that we were able to accumulate enough money for the down-payment on a house with what we saved on food alone. I'll admit that I was not working at the time (stay-at-home mom), but that meant I had no income of my own, and I was also going to grad school part time. And while my students may not be able to grow anything in their apartments, they certainly can learn how to feed themselves more healthfully and more economically. All one needs is will and education.

I've actually discussed questions of mindfulness and food on three other posts, Utopian Pizza, The Raw and the Cooked, and Tangled Webs, all of which consider cultural aspects of food and eating in greater depth. It's harder to rethink fashion, because the whole industry is founded on a couple of problematic principles: a designer's job is based on the idea that clothes go out of style, and the merchandiser wants those clothes to go out of style as quickly as possible in order to keep the industry profitable. I do, however, wonder what the world would be like if we were to design for sustainability instead: styles that never get "old" made from earth-friendly fabrics and dyes by people who aren't exploited.

"Style" based on comfort, practicality, and ethical considerations would be far more appealing to many of us than what's being turned out so frequently today: breast-, butt-, and belly-exposing designs that titillate and seduce, clothes that glorify less-than-desirable human foibles such as drug-use, war, or other forms of excess. Plenty of cultures rely on a few basic clothing items which vary in color and fabric, but little else. But just look at tribal designs in parts of Africa, or saris on a street in India, and you can see that clothing can be expressive without being simply trendy.

What if the quest for the latest fad were replaced by a quest for durability, originality, practicality, and true beauty? Wouldn't it be better to own a few garments that make us feel good, move with our bodies, keep us appropriately warm or cool, and express our sense of color and style without making us all fit into somebody else's idea of what a man or woman should look like? Wouldn't it be better to dress our kids in comfortable, durable, colorful clothes that enable them to move and play freely without trying to make them look like baby soldiers or hookers?

Clothing and feeding are two of the most important things we do for ourselves, in addition to finding a place to live. If we're going to keep this world working for the next few generations, we're going to have to start being much more mindful about how we address questions about how we go about satisfying our needs. And it's precisely because these are needs that they deserve the careful consideration of those who will be working in directly-related professions. Fashion designers and chefs will have a great deal of impact on our economic future. It would help, I think, to remember that "economics" refers not only to the financial well-being of the country, but to the the cultural and ecological well-being of our oikos--our home: this planet.

For resources on these topics, see the "Education of Desire" sites linked on the left. They're good places to start.

Addendum: It occurs to me, a day later, that my remarks about food's costing too little may seem facile and naive when many of the nation's working poor have to choose between spending money on food or on rent--or make any number of equally difficult choices. But a significant number of these same people are the ones who are providing food and food services to the rest of us. It's precisely because they're paid so little that food is relatively inexpensive in this country--especially compared to what it costs in other developed areas of the world, such as Europe. If people received pay equal to the value of their labor, and if profit weren't the major incentive for everything we do, a more equitable economy might result. A good article on the topic by Darra Goldstein can be found in the current issue of Gastronomica.

Photo: Female vendors sitting on the ground at a fruit and vegetable market in Kuchaman, Rajasthan, India. By John Haslam, on Wikimedia Commons.

Graphic Healing

I am amazed, every day that I teach, by the sheer variety of talents my students possess. A large number of them are budding (or even working) graphic designers, and most of them are thoughtful people with ambitions that range from the practical to the lofty, and have discussed with me what they perceive as a sort of "moral danger" attached to what they do, a concern a thoughtful person might have about any field in which technology and money are involved.

What are designers to do, after lumbering themselves with a five-figure debt that will, with interest, most likely run into six figures before it's finally paid off (depending on how they've financed their education)? The easy answer is to sell out to the highest bidder, ask no questions, and do what they're told for the next few years. After that, who knows?

But some of these people are already asking tough questions. How can I do what I love without adding to the myriad problems now facing this fragile planet? Graphic design as a profession is, after all, replete with potential problems. Printing can still involve the use of toxic chemicals, not all of which are disposed of properly (although alternatives are now available). Computers themselves are hardly "green" by nature--and even the most environmentally friendly of them may outsource jobs, impact wildlife habitat, and contain chemicals and materials that will eventually find their way into the waste stream. Not only that, but advertising in particular is a field that all too frequently preys upon human insecurities by manufacturing desire. Human beings like stuff, and most of the businesses that hire designers are involved in making stuff that advertisers are hired to help them sell: whether or not it's necessary, truly useful, or environmentally benign. In the worst cases, advertisers and designers are involved in promoting causes with which the individuals involved may disagree on moral, political, or religious grounds.

It's truly difficult to make choices with the potential for world-healing in an economy that seems to be bleeding away chances for decision-making. While the supermarket shelves may be stocked with seemingly limitless choices among breakfast cereals, there's no telling how long many jobs in the companies that sell these products will be available. Not that selling sugary, chemical-laden breakfast cereal is an ideal job--but it's the kind of job agencies produce.

If you're willing to take a little longer to retire the debt, several options present themselves. Working for non-profit institutions, especially those engaged in bettering the lives of others, may not pay as well as working for Big Advertising, but it generally does pay a salary. You get to meet like-minded people, and work for change at the same time you get to use your skills and talents. But if you do have to settle for a job with The Man, you can still help by doing pro bono work for something you care about. If you freelance, you can build a clientèle of nonprofit groups by charging on a sliding scale, offering your services at lower rates for groups doing work you believe in. You can also focus a portion of your portfolio on "good works" that show off your skills and your commitment at the same time. This runs the risk of alienating folks who don't agree with your causes, but you probably wouldn't want to work for those people, anyway--right? Your portfolio should not just show off your skills; it should provide potential employers with an idea of who you are, and what motivates you.

Asking the right questions can also help make decisions about jobs. During interviews, designers can certainly ask about a company's mission, about the diversity of its workforce, about its clients. Many companies are developing "greener" policies and jumping on the environmental bandwagon as a way of promoting themselves; discussing these issues can help you determine whether their interest is superficial (purely for promotional purposes), or whether they're truly committed to lessening the company's impact on the planet.

In other words, as corporations become more and more concerned about their public images, it may be easier and easier to find jobs that don't compromise designers' priciples. When you have choices, and the best among you will always have choices (well, unless the economy completely tanks, and then we're all in trouble), opt for the job that not only matches your skillset, but is also compatible with your philosophical understanding of the world--even if it doesn't pay as much as a company that doesn't fit as well.

Employment in the field of graphic design is not, by any means, restricted to advertising. Web design, illustration, technical drawing and design, communications media, and education are all fields graphic designers enter, and some offer fewer moral challenges than others. Even if your life's ambition is to design skateboards or teeshirts, you can find yourself in a position to choose materials, and these choices can be made in terms of environmental and/or social impact. Small efforts can often produce significant results.

Think of the promotional possibilities: Joe's Earth-friendly Skateboards, sustainably built, using 85% recycled materials, or Emily's Earth-Shirts: 100% Organic Cotton and Natural Dyes. Donate part of your profits to the World Wildlife Fund or Heifer International, and you'll double your impact! Hell, I'll even buy one (tee-shirt, that is . . . don't think I'll ever get on a skateboard again).

Better yet, think even more deeply about what you're doing, and choose a path that leaves the world less full of stuff. We probably don't need more tee shirts and skateboards, after all, or at least not all that many of them. But surely we can find ways of using design talents to foster sustainable living, by reducing waste and increasing the longevity of what we manufacture. In order to find ways of living that minimize our impact on the planet, and jobs that don't add to the problems that already exist, the first step involves thinking carefully about what we want, what we need, and how we can achieve an appropriate balance between the two.

This is what education is about, and why my students have to take general education courses that introduce them to philosophical concepts related to their fields. In view of this mission, as a general studies instructor I'm assigning the following to get my graphic design and web folk headed down the right path:

In addition to my blog, please see this one: Slow Making, which considers craft as lifework, not just as employment. You might also read "Fear of Not Having Had" in the most recent issue of Orion magazine, which explores the culture of accumulation to which we belong, and raises questions that should be part of your career decision-process.

More discussion to follow. See you in class.

Photo credit: First Aid in 1920 and 1929, from the Meyers Blitz Lexikon, via Wikimedia Commons.

Design to Heal the World

The power of the English language is such that words often do double duty as both nouns and verbs. While this often leads to confusion, it also makes puns possible. I've often thought that this fact might make for interesting names, and even played with the idea in my novel (giving various characters names like Bend, Cook, Book, Hand). And so I managed to accomplish a bit of a pun in my title for this blog; it's both an exhortation (do it--design to heal the world), and a commentary on how design itself can save the world. The post is, in fact, a plea to my students as designers, and an acknowledgment of design's innate power. Of course, I'm not the first by any means to suggest that artists and designers possess this power. William Morris believed it to his core, and it's the basic notion behind such movements as the Vienna Secession and the Bauhaus.

The Arts and Crafts Movement, in fact, provides an excellent example of how people have responded to social problems by proposing art as an anodyne. Educate people and teach them craft, and you will provide them with a way to earn a living, and a way to engage their minds. The Bauhaus was founded on similar ideas about the democracy of art and craft, although unlike Morris's movement, it embraced the machine as a way to construct high-quality, well-designed goods for a less well-heeled clientèle than Morris & Company had served.

Most of my formal teaching career has been spent helping design students understand the significance of design within the larger scope of the humanities, and familiarizing them with the history of their craft. But I don't often get a chance to impress upon them the importance of choosing a path within the various applications of design that can lead to positive--and necessary (especially for their own future well being)--change. And unlike most of the politicians strutting about these days, I'm going to get specific here. By "change" I mean altering the present global political and economic course toward choosing more sustainable, less destructive, and more life-affirming means more closely aligned to the ends toward which they are directed.

Many such paths are currently available to us on a personal economic (remember the roots of the word: oikos means "home," and nomos "principle" in ancient Greek) level: smaller homes, more fuel-efficient cars, more mindful energy consumption, conservation practices such as recycling and resource management, care of land and property, use of public transportation, participation in civic affairs. But on a professional level, choices can often become more difficult, especially when a student is faced (as most of mine are) with significant monetary debt that often leads to their taking the first job that comes along to help relieve the burden. I certainly understand this impulse, having never been in a position to be particularly choosy about those for whom I work. Nevertheless, I thought I'd focus the next couple of blog entries on some suggestions: questions to ask, things to consider, etc., before my students graduate and go off to make their way in this increasingly fragile world.

I was actually inspired to do this by my own daughter, who plans to graduate in December with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Interior Design. Because she already has a job she enjoys and that pays her well enough to support herself and her Very Large Dog, she's sometimes ambivalent about going through the process of becoming a licensed designer (interior architecture is probably a better description of the field she's studying) because it would initially involve a pay cut and a period of what amounts to apprenticeship before she can take her qualifying exams. In addition to this, and as much as I love shelter magazines that promote sustainable design, I see the stereotypical, Architectural Digest model of interior design as gluttonous, wasteful, and extravagant, no matter how many articles focus on the environmental activities of celebrities. I am, therefore, particularly interested in how she plans to use this degree.

So when she started bubbling over about her senior project idea--a cancer center for children--I quite simply beamed with pride and gratitude. The project she outlined would actually marry her professional and social lives, because most of her "off" time (little as there is of it) is spent raising money by participating in cycling marathons for the Leukemia Lymphoma Society (the link is to her Team in Training fund-raising page). She initially was prompted to do this by the death of a friend's child, and many of the "honored heroes" she rides for are cancer-afflicted friends and family, or survivors of leukemia or other cancers.

Then I started thinking of all the useful ways through which design professionals can contribute to world betterment. Although I no longer teach interior design students, it's clear that they don't all have to go to work designing opulent surroundings for rich people, or sell out to firms that ignore the impact of construction-related industries on the planet. In fact, the field of interior design seems to be evolving toward sustainability; students take courses in green design and adaptive reuse, and materials classes increasingly focus on recycled materials, organic sources, and energy efficiency. Imagine what would happen if a conflagration of interior designers were to ignite their profession with the spark of sustainability! End of silly metaphor.

The next few blog entries will pursue this discussion, focusing on one or two fields in succession. A couple of my students have already broached the subject in responses to previous posts, and I welcome their suggestions. We are, after all, in this together--although if we do it right, they'll be "in it" a lot longer than my generation will. I think they deserve a chance at a better world, and it's our responsibility to help them learn how to make it.

Photo: "Darwin's Thinking Path" described by its maker (Tedgrant at Wikimedia Commons) thus: "This is a path in the grounds of Down House. Darwin regularly walked along this path for exercise of body and mind. He called it his 'Thinking Path'. I visited Down House on my 60th birthday and took this picture with my digital camera."

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

Unlike many of my fellow bloggers, I find it difficult to comment on events immediately. For one thing, doing so smacks of knee-jerking, so I'm rather loathe to jump in too quickly. As I age, I also find it necessary to stew longer in order to form a cogent response. So although news of the recent polling debacle in New Hampshire is shortly to be overshadowed by whatever comes out of Nevada and South Carolina, I'm still miffed about the roll of polls in the so-called "democratic process," and about the way statistics are currently being used and interpreted, and I'm just now getting around to posting about it.

Benjamin Disraeli, who provided the title for the post (through Mark Twain for many of us), probably had little experience with polls, since Victorian England was short on instantaneous media outlets (although there was that enviable twice-a-day mail service and lots of messengers running around). But I am becoming increasingly angry at the intrusiveness of proliferating numbers-gatherers, whether for political or commercial purposes. I remember being called by a Gallup rep once when I lived in Chicago and possessed more patience than I do now. I can't remember the initial question, but it offered three possible answers, none of which even came close to describing my opinion. When I complained about this to the pollster, he proceeded with some gibberish about how the questions were designed to take that into account and that whatever came closest would provide a statistically valid sample within an acceptable margin of error. That's when I hung up. Now I always hang up, after loosing a few choice words about what I think of polls and the people who take them.

Perhaps this is why I have developed such a suspicious nature and have lost so much of my faith in human intelligence. I don't care how many people you survey; unless you get every one of us, your "margin of error" is not going to reflect what's actually going on in peoples' minds. It might give you a range of possibilities, but if the choices are very limited and specific, errors will creep in, and the fewer people asked these questions, the greater the possibility the poll will contain significant errors. I have no statistical basis for saying this. I only have experience and common sense on my side--having lived in several locations on this planet, among a large number of divergent cultural influences, for a long time. Democracy is not about numbers; it's about people. Focus groups pretend to be about people, because they're composed of small, face-to-face "samples" of "target audiences" in specific "demographics" (since when did "demographic" become a noun?)--but they're even worse, precisely because their numbers are so tiny. They do not really represent me; but then, being older than the preferred 18-34 age-group, I apparently don't deserve representation.

The trouble is, thanks to indoctrination by Madison Avenue through every medium that provides us with news, "we the people" have become extremely malleable and stupifyingly gullible. Folks who can be persuaded that they need to buy dish-washing liquid with air freshener pellets in the bottom of the bottle (probably the topic of a later blog) can be persuaded of any uncritical claptrap that shows up on the telly--from the presence of UFOs in Stephenville, Texas, to unsuspecting twins' marrying one another in England. And I'm certainly not convinced that exit polls conducted during primaries or general elections and reported on while the elections are still in progress don't affect what later voters do.

What I truly do not understand is why we just can't simply sit back, have a beer, and wait for the bloody results! It is in no way important to the outcome of any election for voters to know who won until after the polls have closed and the votes have been tallied. Most ballots are now cast electronically (thanks to previous disasters), and can be counted almost instantaneously. But our addiction to "breaking news" and instant gratification--or at least the perception by news media that we just can't wait--has led us to the point where people are accosted right and left, fresh out of the voting booth, and asked to answer intrusive questions which will be gathered into a spurious database, the numbers crunched, and then reported by the polling agency to the newspapers and television outlets as the Word of God.

It's not that I think numbers themselves are useless or all statistics baseless. In fact, I've only recently discovered some very interesting websites and material of a statistical nature that seem to be responsibly and helpfully constructed. I started looking into the topic when my son (who was in town this week doing a statistical audit of Star Wars Pocket Model packets, which are manufactured locally) suggested that I locate some of Edward Tufte's books on design. When I did so, I was intrigued by the fact that Tufte writes not only on the visual delivery of information in general, but on effective (and, it seems, ethical) delivery of quantitative information as well.

As it turns out, I was already familiar with Tufte, because he authored one of my most oft-quoted truisms: "Power Corrupts; PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely"--the title of an article he wrote for Wired magazine (September 2003). Since I'm known for my bipolar relationship with the technologies I use (at once loving them and hating them), I frequently seek out critical assessments so that I'm aware of both the benefits and problems associated with tools like the internet and varieties of software. In a later article, "PowerPoint Does Rocket Science: Assessing the Quality and Credibility of Technical Reports," he provides an in-depth analysis of how this particular software is constructed and used--often badly, and on occasion disastrously--and how its use can be improved. At the end of the article he lists some examples of well-designed presentations, which led me to Gapminder.

According to its information page, "Gapminder is a non-profit venture promoting sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by increased use and understanding of statistics and other information about social, economic and environmental development at local, national and global levels." So here we have (finally), an organization dedicated to gathering statistical information, but which (using clear, engaging presentations) actually helps the general public understand what all the numbers mean. It even features a PowerPoint presentation--one that doesn't participate in the software's implicit hierarchy--to help viewers understand why interpreting statistics is important in the first place. And this brings me to something of an epiphany: numbers can be illustrative; they actually can tell us something about what's going on in the world. But they have to be sensibly presented and thoughtfully interpreted in order to be meaningful and/or useful.

In fairness to political pollsters, I did run across an interesting blog, Prof. Charles Franklin's Political Arithmetik, which keeps track of election poll results, presidential approval rates, etc. I'm not convinced that this stuff really means anything, but if you want to know what's going on, he's got links and charts galore. In my utopia, however, there are no polls. That's mostly because in my utopia, we'd all know what had to be done, we'd work through consensus, and we wouldn't have to vote. But since we live here, on our imperfect planet earth, what we can do when confronted with pollsters is what the anti-drug campaigners are always urging: just say "no."