Yeah — and Another Thing!

Demonstrations are finally just an act of faith. The river of sign-carrying grandparents, vets and kids, even if it flows to the horizon, is a creek in the electoral watershed. And the message is mixed — embarrass the Republicans, push the Democrats to deliver the message, push the Democrats to shut down the war budget, create a credible third electoral force, abandon federal politics, abandon our oil-based economy, love thy neighbor.

But there’s a cathartic thrill that comes with saying it out loud: No. Sooner or later almost all of us are going to say No because the stupidity, immorality, futility and viciousness of this war is a truth that we all feel somewhere inside, and little by little all but a few deluded souls will finally say, No, this war is wrong.

A few weeks ago, we crossed the street through the evening rush hour in Harrisburg because there was a group of sign-toters on the opposite corner, the first we’d seen of public protest since we’d arrived several months ago, and a little surprising for Harrisburg, a town as empty as it is apathetic. We were at Walnut and Front, standing with the protesters (it seemed the only decent thing to do) and watching the traffic flow, alternating between southbound on Front and eastbound off the bridge.

Standing on a street corner holding a sign can feel uncomfortable, but not nearly as uncomfortable as sitting in the driver’s seat, waiting for a traffic light, ring-side at a protest, and wanting to pretend that you don’t see and don’t know. A few had the cheerful gumption to honk and a couple had the balls to lean out their windows and yell, “Losers! Rot in Hell.” That’s when I began to feel at home. Whoever these people were, standing in the cold, keeping candles alight and signs aloft while reading the names of dead American soldiers, I was one of them.

Weeks later we drove to Washington to do the same sort of thing with several thousand like-minded folks on the Mall and a couple dozen like the fellow with the Code Pink sign, exercising his constitutional right. We’re not sure how big the crowd was — police decline to estimate and the numbers claimed by some of the organizers didn’t make sense. But as we stood on the grass and looked in all directions, we saw nothing but protesters all the way to the horizon.

I’d like to think that each of these — the ones willing now to say it out loud — represents some larger number who are still sitting at the stop lights pretending not to know, and that this multiplication might suggest a political majority. I’m sure that’s true, but when will it mean something?

My day-to-day experience is that the detachment of the American public from the reality of this war is just stunning, as if we know but are trying not to hurt each others’ feelings. Because, when pressed, we tend to talk in a common-sense way about futility and cruelty of conducting it. Why are we so well-mannered and timid about this? Why aren’t we outraged by killing in the service of a lie? You don’t have to be a pacifist — I’m not — to be pissed off.

If you’ve never been to a demo, it’s time. You’ll be surrounded by nice people who look like your gray-haired neighbors, many of them vets, and others who look like your kids and their motley friends. You can dress up if that’s what you’re into. And your sign can say anything you like because, after all, we live in America. In fact, you might event want to stand with the folks under the hanging effigy of Jane Fonda and tell the likes of me to rot in hell. It won’t kill us.

Want to join a demo? United for Peace is the place to check.

Need some help making up your mind about this war? I recommend Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawl, but dozens of choices show up if you search Amazon.com with “Iraq”.

It was an “amazing fact” of my early education that North American natives did not invent the wheel. There are a number of things that North Americans did not do before the rest of us began ticking them off, but failing to invent the wheel was the one that really seemed to irk the writers of what you might call “Boy’s Own History”, after the style of that encyclopedic and naive children’s journal. The historians wrote extra carefully about this business of the wheel, it seemed to me, avoiding any speculation on why the natives blew it off. This made their disappointment all the more evident. I bought the their underlying message pretty easily — “backward and lazy” I agreed, and moved on to other boy’s own intellectual considerations.

All we really know, of course, is that early North Americans didn’t make any significant use of the wheel. Further, that rather than failing to invent the wheel, they may have conceived it and on sober second thought, decided not to take it any further. In fact, some pre-Columbian might have considered a wheel-like thing, speculated on materials and lubrication, thought through the business of fabrication, and then brought up these ideas by the evening fire.

“Yeah, not a bad idea, but I don’t think it would work out.” A long, flickering pause follows as an old uncle waves smoke out of his eyes. “You see the problem is the shopping malls. Nothing wrong with the wheel itself, but do you really want to see shopping malls all the way from here to the coast?”

“See what you mean …That’d suck.”

Technological innovation is often a balloon — you squeeze it here and it pops out there. There are usually unplanned consequences. I was thinking about the wheel and the natives because I was kneading a bread dough, which is also a kind of balloon, but more likely to induce meditation. I wasn’t kneading it very much because the recipe is for “no-knead” bread as featured in the New York Times ??? a recipe that promises a technological innovation: bread without the hard work.

For the non-bakers, a quick note on kneading. This pushing and stretching that we all associate with bread baking develops the strength and elasticity of the dough. To over-simplify, kneading is what separates good bread from cooked dough — it’s what gives the dough the tensile strength to contain gasses produced by yeast and make the bread rise. Most bakers will tell you that kneading, whether by hand or machine, is essential to good quality bread.

That’s what a good baker told me. Donna Bartolini taught me how to bake bread. We met on the Toronto Subway platform at Dundas West station most mornings on the way to work. She ran a test kitchen for a magazine publisher and I worked in software. After some encouragement, I would bag a sample of my weekend’s effort and Donna would criticize it while we stood, shoulder-to-shoulder with a subway car full of commuters. Sometimes Donna’s opinion was harsh and easy enough to hear over the noise of the train. But I was ambitious. I wanted to bake the perfect whole wheat French boule or pain de campagne (country bread), a la Poilane, and I worked on it many weekends in a row. (I was motivated at least partly by the self-satisfied smugness of one who knows something few others do. In this case, I had read that what we think of as “French Bread”, the baguette, is really more Viennese than French. Real French bread is a dome-shaped affair of hearty whole wheat. It was the price of this boule, rather than the price of a baguette, that contributed to the revolutionary riots in Paris and the march on Versailles in 1789.)

As you can see, this is not just flour, water, salt and yeast we’re talking about.

In December I became one of what must be tens of thousands of home bakers who experimented with a new way of baking bread. I’m not qualified on this subject, but I’ll speculate anyway that Jim Lahey of the Sullivan Street Bakery in New York City (533 West 47th Street in Manhattan) may have combined existing ideas when he proposed baking bread without kneading it and then baking it in an iron casserole. Nevertheless, no-knead bread’s popularity marks a technical turning point in baking.

At first the notion is more than counter-intuitive. How can that gluten be exercised if you don’t take it to the mat? But it seems to be sufficiently exercised, or at least the replacement process seems to accomplish the same result. Jim Lahey instructs us to leave the bread for a particularly long rise — 18 hours. You mix up a dough at dinner time on a Friday and by Saturday afternoon, you’ve got some baking to do.

The second innovation is to bake the dough in a heavy casserole. Since Karen had found an irresistible deal on a Le Creuset iron pot only days before she sent me the URL for the New York Times article on Lahey, I was able to see what everyone was chattering about. This idea makes more sense — and it’s just very clever. Since the Viennese discovered steam-heated baking to achieve crustiness in their baguette, we’ve known that steam in the oven produces a fine, crisp crust. (We’ve probably known this even longer but out of ignorance of the history, I’ll hand them credit.) This is hard to do in a home oven and the iron pot solves the problem by retaining the water vapor from the moisture in the dough.

Yes, Lahey is right: the bread is wonderful and doesn’t take the whole weekend. It really is a technological innovation. I won’t get into the method any further here because it’s discussed all over the net. Search on “no-knead bread” or check the links at the bottom of this text.

What does interest me about no-knead bread baking is its unintended consequence. If wheels lead to shopping malls and the transistor leads to disaffected youth, where is no-knead bread going to take us?

A new way of doing something usually takes hold if it is able to accomplish a large fraction of the result at a small fraction of the cost, and once we accept that bargain, there is a second beneficial effect that takes us in a new and unexpected direction, which is followed by the unintended consequence. It’s the techno three-step: accept it in economic terms, enjoy it cultural terms and then realize the consequence in historical terms.

For example, photographic typesetting and offset printing. It was not as beautiful and consistent as letter-press, but it was cheaper. After it was introduced, any average retailer could afford to produce 100,000 eight-page, color product flyers and soon newspaper publishers could earn more revenue delivering these to “consumers” than could be earned from selling the work of journalists and editors to “readers”. So they ceded that business to TV. The voting public became illiterate, apathetic, materialistic, grumpy and frightened, and ended up with George Bush in the White House. You can see why I’m worried.

Thanks to Lahey, no-knead bread is very good, though not as good as the all-weekend boule, and now I can produce real bread at home with only several minutes of work rather than four or five hours. (Yes, the bread still takes about 21 hours to make, but I don’t have to be there for most of it.) We’ve bought the economic logic. Next, households all over the yeast bread part of the world will be enjoying bread that’s better than anything you can produce commercially.

And then what? Supermarkets, pushed to the brink by rising gasoline prices and then over the edge by shrinking sales in the baking departments begin to abandon marginal stores? Shopping malls fall into ruin as key retail renters starve for lack of supermarket traffic? Swaths of suburban land are left to colonization by scrub trees, foxes and other small animals? Disaffected youth band together with returned army vets, unemployed auto workers and Iraqi peasants — who have been granted special immigration status as part of US war reparations — to form self-sufficient villages?

Beyond the ancient grid streets and the ruins of the overhead highways, under the bent and weathered metal banners of the shopping malls, cinder-block villages grow from the crumbled asphalt. A strange new, four-part mix of cultures binds and flourishes as a new community. In the evenings, their fires flicker against the few surviving window panes.

Something smells done.

Further browsing:

- North American natives and the wheel

- Boy’s Own Paper

- History of the Shopping Mall

- The Women’s March on Versailles

- Physics of dough

- No-Knead bread recipe and only one other of thousands of discussions about no-knead bread

- Suburban decline