I BOUGHT A CAR THE OTHER DAY, and

. . this is a tale of coincidence. For a couple of months now, I’ve been stopping on the spur of the moment to drive 2005 compact cars. I’ve been unhappy with the dent in my Ford Aspire door created when another driver pulled in beside me in a parking space and hit my opening door. I’d driven a Chevy Aveo and a Suzuki Swift and was thinking about trying a Focus, plus a month or so ago, I drove a Honda Scion.

Finally, I make an instantaneous decision to drive out to the Spokane Kia place in Liberty Lake outside of Spokane to drive a Rio. It’s a long drive, but it was a cloudy day, and I felt like moving around rather than reading which is what I usually do. So I pull smack up in front of the Kia front door, turn the ignition off and break the key off in the ignition. Strike one!

The salesman exits the door and we talk about me getting a locksmith to come to the Kia place. Then I tell him how much I like my Aspire, still getting 30 mpg and purring along pretty nicely with no major repairs for years now, but he responds that I’m driving a Kia and shows me the vehicle ID number which shows that the Aspire was made by Kia all those many years ago. Strike two.

Then I tell him, I can’t buy right then because my wife has the checkbook and she’s clear out in Airway Heights, but he says I can drive the Rio out there and get the checkbook but, I inform him that she works in a prison, and I can’t go out there and get in very easily. O, he says, and his smile shrinks. I go out in the car to get something from the glove compartment. I’m looking to see if I have the registration, and, what do I find? but the box of checks I’d picked up three weeks before and forgotten. I take the box in to the salesman, hold it up and say, I give up. I’m buying. Strike three!


MORE BERGMAN ON BERGMAN

To us poor unenlightened, Bergman seems such an intellectual film maker, but over and over, he claims differently. Look at how he talks about his characters: “The people in my films are exactly like myself— creatures of instinct, of rather poor intellectual capacity, who at best only think while they’re talking. Mostly they’re body with a little hollow for the soul.” (p. 190) Of course, from what psychological researchers are learning about all of us when we talk, none of us have much control over our language. Language just flows, the choices being made beyond control of our conscious processes.

When his interviewers ask him about his agnosticism, he says, “Nothing, absolutely nothing at all has emerged out of all these ideas of faith and skepticism. . . . For many of my fellow human beings, on the other hand, I’m aware that these problems still exist and exist as a terrible reality. I hope this generation will be the last to live under the scourge of religious anxiety.” (p. 195)


NEWSWEEK’S R. SAMUELSON SAYS. . . .

In a recent report, Samuelson whose work I usually admire demonstrates why the president, whoever he is, has little ability to control the current wage decline, but, my point recently has been that the president can see it coming and get busy shoring up the safety net and arranging society in better ways to take a little from the rich and give to the poor.


ALL WE MUST RESIST

When I was younger, I recall essays and discussions in the popular press about the aggressive instinct in humankind. To curb aggressiveness was one of the impulses to create non-competitive games and group activities. The "Ungame" came out of those times, but most people thought that we could do little about human aggressiveness. I still don't know that we can alter human aggressiveness, unless some of us are evolving along cultural lines rather than physiological line. Some light might be at the end of the tunnel.

However, E.O. Wilson in "The Future of Life" (p. 40) still posits mankind as a being which remains rooted in ancient physical rather the intellectual realities: "The human brain. . . evolved to commit itself emotionally only to a small piece of geography, a limited band of kinsmen and two or three generations into the future." In "The Blank Slate" Steven Pinker concludes some of the same things about the limited extent of human altruism. Our animal nature just naturally holds us back from being altruistic to too many of our fellows. It's written into our genes that we place our own progeny ahead of othess, but altruism is also a survival tactic. For if we can all get along, then no one's progeny stands to go extinct. We're back to the Golden Rule, an almost universal human value.
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"Thanks to the miles of superhighways under construction, America will soon be a wonderful place to drive—if you dont want to stop." —Fletcher Knebel