Bully for Brontosaurus Read online

  This claim cannot be sustained for two basic reasons. First, science uses and requires no special mental equipment beyond the scope of a standard school curriculum. The subject matter may be different but the cerebral tools are common to all learning. Science probes the factual state of the world; religion and ethics deal with moral reasoning; art and literature treat aesthetic and social judgment.

  Second, we may put aside all abstract arguments and rely on the empirical fact that other nations have had great success in science education. If their kids can handle the material, so can ours, with proper motivation and instruction. Korea has made great strides in education, particularly in mathematics and the physical sciences. And if you attempt to take refuge in the cruel and fallacious argument that Orientals are genetically built to excel in such subjects, I simply point out that European nations, filled with people more like most of us, have been just as successful. The sciences are well taught and appreciated in the Soviet Union, for example, where the major popular bookstores on Leninsky Prospekt are stocked with technical books both browsed and purchased in large numbers. Moreover, we proved the point to ourselves in the late 1950s, when the Soviet Sputnik inspired cold war fears of Russian technological takeover, and we responded, for once, with adequate cash, expertise, and enthusiasm, by launching a major effort to improve secondary education in science. But that effort, begun for the wrong reasons, soon petered out into renewed mediocrity (graced, as always, with pinpoints of excellence here and there, whenever a great teacher and adequate resources coincide).

  We live in a profoundly nonintellectual culture, made all the worse by a passive hedonism abetted by the spread of wealth and its dissipation into countless electronic devices that impart the latest in entertainment and supposed information—all in short (and loud) doses of “easy listening.” The kiddie culture, or playground, version of this nonintellectualism can be even more strident and more one-dimensional, but the fault must lie entirely with adults—for our kids are only enhancing a role model read all too clearly.

  I’m beginning to sound like an aging Miniver Cheevy, or like the chief reprobate on Ko-Ko’s little list “of society offenders who might well be underground”—and he means dead and buried, not romantically in opposition: “the idiot who praises with enthusiastic tone, all centuries but this and every country but his own.” I want to make an opposite and curiously optimistic point about our current mores: We are a profoundly nonintellectural culture, but we are not committed to this attitude; in fact, we are scarcely committed to anything. We may be the most labile culture in all history, capable of rapid and massive shifts of prevailing opinions, all imposed from above by concerted media effort. Passivity and nonintellectual judgment are the greatest spurs to such lability. Everything comes to us in fifteen-second sound bites and photo opportunities. All possibility for ambiguity—the most precious trait of any adequate analysis—is erased. He wins who looks best or shouts loudest. We are so fearful of making judgments ourselves that we must wait until the TV commentators have spoken before deciding whether Bush or Dukakis won the debate.

  We are therefore maximally subject to imposition from above. Nonetheless, this dangerous trait can be subverted for good. A few years ago, in the wake of an unparalleled media blitz, drugs rose from insignificance to a strong number one on the list of serious American problems in that most mercurial court of public opinion as revealed by polling. Surely we can provoke the same immediate recognition for poor education. Talk about “wasted minds.” Which cause would you pick as the greater enemy, quantitatively speaking, in America: crack or lousy education abetted by conformity and peer pressure in an anti-intellectual culture?

  We live in a capitalist economy, and I have no particular objection to honorable self-interest. We cannot hope to make the needed, drastic improvement in primary and secondary education without a dramatic restructuring of salaries. In my opinion, you cannot pay a good teacher enough money to recompense the value of talent applied to the education of young children. I teach an hour or two a day to tolerably well-behaved near-adults—and come home exhausted. By what possible argument are my services worth more in salary than those of a secondary-school teacher with six classes a day, little prestige, less support, massive problems of discipline, and a fundamental role in shaping minds. (In comparison, I only tinker with intellects already largely formed.) Why are salaries so low, and attendant prestige so limited, for the most important job in America? How can our priorities be so skewed that when we wish to raise the status of science teachers, we take the media route and try to place a member of the profession into orbit (with disastrous consequences, as it happened), rather than boosting salaries on earth? (The crisis in science teaching stems directly from this crucial issue of compensation. Science graduates can begin in a variety of industrial jobs at twice the salary of almost any teaching position; potential teachers in the arts and humanities often lack these well-paid alternatives and enter the public schools faute de mieux.)

  We are now at a crux of opportunity, and the situation may not persist if we fail to exploit it. If I were king, I would believe Gorbachev, realize that the cold war is a happenstance of history—not a necessary and permanent state of world politics—make some agreements, slash the military budget, and use just a fraction of the savings to double the salary of every teacher in American public schools. I suspect that a shift in prestige, and the consequent attractiveness of teaching to those with excellence and talent, would follow.

  I don’t regard these suggestions as pipe dreams, but having been born before yesterday, I don’t expect their immediate implementation either. I also acknowledge, of course, that reforms are not imposed from above without vast and coordinated efforts of lobbying and pressuring from below. Thus, as we work toward a larger and more coordinated solution, and as a small contribution to the people’s lobby, could we not immediately subvert more of the dinosaur craze from crass commercialism to educational value?

  Dinosaur names can become the model for rote learning. Dinosaur facts and figures can inspire visceral interest and lead to greater wonder about science. Dinosaur theories and reconstructions can illustrate the rudiments of scientific reasoning. But I’d like to end with a more modest suggestion. Nothing makes me sadder than the peer pressure that enforces conformity and erases wonder. Countless Americans have been permanently deprived of the joys of singing because a thoughtless teacher once told them not to sing, but only to mouth the words at the school assembly because they were “off-key.” Once told, twice shy and perpetually fearful. Countless others had the light of intellectual wonder extinguished because a thoughtless and swaggering fellow student called them nerds on the playground. Don’t point to the obsessives—I was one—who will persist and succeed despite these petty cruelties of youth. For each of us, a hundred are lost—more timid and fearful, but just as capable. We must rage against the dying of the light—and although Dylan Thomas spoke of bodily death in his famous line, we may also apply his words to the extinction of wonder in the mind, by pressures of conformity in an anti-intellectual culture.

  The New York Times, in an article on science education in Korea, interviewed a nine-year-old girl and inquired after her personal hero. She replied: Stephen Hawking. Believe me, I have absolutely nothing against Larry Bird or Michael Jordan, but wouldn’t it be lovely if even one American kid in 10,000 gave such an answer. The article went on to say that science whizzes are class heroes in Korean schools, not isolated and ostracized dweebs.

  English wars may have been won on the playing fields of Eton, but American careers in science are destroyed on the playgrounds of Shady Oaks Elementary School. Can we not invoke dinosaur power to alleviate these unspoken tragedies? Can’t dinosaurs be the great levelers and integrators—the joint passion of the class rowdy and the class intellectual? I will know that we are on our way when the kid who names Chasmosaurus as his personal hero also earns the epithet of Mr. Cool.

  Postscript

  I had never
made an explicit request of readers before, but I was really curious and couldn’t find the answer in my etymological books. Hence, my little parenthetical inquiry about segue: “Can anyone tell me how this fairly obscure Italian term from my musical education managed its recent entry into trendy American speech?” The question bugged me because two of my students, innocent alas (as most are these days) of classical music, use segue all the time, and I longed to know where they found it. Both simply considered segue as Ur-English when I asked, perhaps the very next word spoken by our ultimate forefather after his introductory, palindromic “Madam I’m Adam” (as in “segue into the garden with me, won’t you”).

  I am profoundly touched and gratified. The responses came in waves and even yielded, I believe, an interesting resolution. (These letters also produced the salutary effect of reminding me how lamentably ignorant I am about a key element of American culture—pop music and its spin-offs.) I’ve always said to myself that I write these essays primarily for personal learning; this claim has now passed its own test.

  One set of letters (more than two dozen) came from people in their twenties and thirties who had been (or in a case or two, still are) radio deejays for rock stations (a temporary job on a college radio station for most). They all report that segue is a standard term for the delicate task (once rather difficult in the days of records and turntables) of making an absolutely smooth transition, without any silence in between or words to cover the change, from one song to the next.

  I was quite happy to accept this solution, but I then began to receive letters from old-timers in the radio and film business—all pointing to uses in the 1920s and 1930s (and identifying the lingo of rock deejays as a later transfer). David Emil wrote of his work in television during the mid-1960s:

  The word was in usage as a noun and verb when I worked in the television production industry…. It was common for television producers to use the phrase to refer to connections between segments of television shows…. Interestingly, although I read a large number of scripts at this time, I never saw the word in writing or knew how it was spelled until the mid-1970s when I came across the word in a more traditional usage.

  Bryant Mather, former curator of minerals at the Field Museum in Chicago, sent me an old mimeographed script of his sole appearance on radio—an NBC science show of 1940 entitled How Do You Know, and produced “as a public service feature by the Field Museum of Natural History in cooperation with the University Broadcasting Council.”

  The script, which uses segue to describe all transitions between scenes in a dramatization of the history of the Orloff diamond, reminds us by its stereotyping and barely concealed racism (despite the academic credentials of its origin) that some improvements have been made in our attitudes toward human diversity. In one scene, for example, the diamond is bought by Isaacs, described as “a Jewish merchant.” His hectoring wife, called “Mama” by Mr. Isaacs, keeps pestering: “Buy it, Isaacs—you hear me—buy it.” Isaacs later sells to a shifty Persian, who cheats him by placing lead coins under the surface of gold in his treasure bag. Isaacs, discovering the trick, laments: “Counterfeit—lead—oi, oi, oi—Mama—we are ruined—we are ruined.” (Shades of Shylock—my ducats, my daughter.) The script’s next line reads “segue to music suggestive of Amsterdam or busy port.”

  Page Gilman made the earliest link to radio and traced a most sensible transition (dare I say segue) between musical and modern media usages. I will accept his statement as our best resolution to date:

  I think you may find that a bridge between the classical music to which you refer and today’s disk jockey use would be the many years of network radio. I began in 1927 and even the earliest scripts would occasionally use “segue” because we had a big staff of professional working musicians—people who worked (in those days) in restaurants, theaters (especially), and now radio. Today you’ll find a real corps of such folks only in New York and L.A.…. You’ll find me corroborated a little by Pauline Kael of the New Yorker, who remembers Horace Heidt’s orchestra at the Golden Gate Theater in San Francisco. That was the time when I was dating one of the Downey Sisters in the same orchestra. [May I also report the confirmation of my beloved 92-year-old Uncle Mordie of Rochester, New York, who relished his 1920s daily job in a movie orchestra, playing with the Wurlitzer during the silents and between shows—and never liked nearly as much his forty-year subsequent stint as lead violist in the Rochester Symphony.] I wonder if Bruce Springsteen ever heard of “segue.” On such uncultured times have working musicians fallen.

  This tracing of origins does not solve the more immediate problem of recent infiltration into general trendy speech. But perhaps this is not even an issue in our media-centered world, where any jargon of the industry stands poised to break out. Among many suggestions for this end of the tale, several readers report that Johnny Carson has prominently used segue during the past few years—and I doubt that we would need much more to effect a general spread.

  Finally, on my more general inquiry into the sources of our current dinomania, I can’t even begin to chronicle the interesting suggestions for fear of composing another book. Just one wistful observation for now. Last year, riding a bus down Haight Street in San Francisco, I approached the junction with Ashbury eager to see what businesses now occupied the former symbolic and actual center of American counterculture. Would you believe that just three or four stores down from the junction itself stands one of those stores that peddles nothing but reptilian paraphernalia and always seems to bear the now-clichéd name “Dinostore.” What did Tennyson say in the Idylls of the King?

  The old order changeth, yielding

  place to new;

  And God fulfills himself in

  many ways,

  Lest one good custom should corrupt

  the world.

  3 | Adaptation

  7 | Of Kiwi Eggs and the Liberty Bell

  LIKE OZYMANDIAS, once king of kings but now two legs of a broken statue in Percy Shelley’s desert, the great façade of Union Station in Washington, D.C., stands forlorn (but ready to front for a bevy of yuppie emporia now under construction), while Amtrak now operates from a dingy outpost at the side.* Six statues, portraying the greatest of human arts and inventions, grace its parapet. Electricity holds a bar of lightning; his inscription proclaims: “Carrier of light and power. Devourer of time and space…. Greatest servant of man…. Thou hast put all things under his feet.”

  Yet I will cast my vote for the Polynesian double canoe, constructed entirely with stone adzes, as the greatest invention for devouring time and space in all human history. These vessels provided sufficient stability for long sea voyages. The Polynesian people, without compass or sextant, but with unparalleled understanding of stars, waves, and currents, navigated these canoes to colonize the greatest emptiness of our earth, the “Polynesian triangle,” stretching from New Zealand to Hawaii to Easter Island at its vertices. Polynesians sailed forth into the open Pacific more than a thousand years before Western navigators dared to leave the coastline of Africa and make a beeline across open water from the Guinea coast to the Cape of Good Hope.

  New Zealand, southwestern outpost of Polynesian migrations, is so isolated that not a single mammal (other than bats and seals with their obvious means of transport) managed to intrude. New Zealand was a world of birds, dominated by several species (thirteen to twenty-two by various taxonomic reckonings) of large, flightless moas. Only Aepyornis, the extinct elephant bird of Madagascar, ever surpassed the largest moa, Dinornis maximus, in weight. Ornithologist Dean Amadon estimated the average weight of D. maximus at 520 pounds (although some recent revisions nearly double this bulk), compared with about 220 pounds for ostriches, the largest living birds.

  We must cast aside the myths of noble non-Westerners living in ecological harmony with their potential quarries. The ancestors of New Zealand’s Maori people based a culture on hunting moas, but soon made short work of them, both by direct removal and by burning of habitat t
o clear areas for agriculture. Who could resist a 500-pound chicken?

  Only one species of New Zealand ratite has survived. (Ratites are a closely related group of flightless ground birds, including moas, African ostriches, South American rheas, and Australian-New Guinean emus and cassowaries. Flying birds have a keeled breastbone, providing sufficient area for attachment of massive flight muscles. The breastbones of ratites lack a keel, and their name honors that most venerable of unkeeled vessels, the raft, or ratis in Latin.) We know this curious creature more as an icon on tins of shoe polish or as the moniker for New Zealand’s human inhabitants—the kiwi, only hen-sized, but related most closely to moas among birds.

  Three species of kiwis inhabit New Zealand today, all members of the genus Apteryx (literally, wingless). Kiwis lack an external tail, and their vestigial wings are entirely hidden beneath a curious plumage—shaggy, more like fur than feathers, and similar in structure to the juvenile down of most other birds. (Maori artisans used kiwi feathers to make the beautiful cloaks once worn by chiefs; but the small, secretive, and widely ranging nocturnal kiwis managed to escape the fate of their larger moa relatives.)

  The furry bodies, with even contours unbroken by tail or wings, are mounted on stout legs—giving the impression of a double blob (small head and larger body) on sticks. Kiwis eat seeds, berries, and other parts of plants, but they favor earthworms. Their long, thin bills probe the soil continually, suggesting the oddly reversed perspective of a stick leading a blind man. This stick, however, is richly endowed as a sensory device, particularly as an organ of smell. The bill, uniquely among birds, bears long external nostrils, while the olfactory bulb of kiwi brains is second largest among birds relative to size of the forebrain. A peculiar creature indeed.