Anthems

O Canada! our home and native land!
True patriot-love in all thy sons command.
With glowing hearts we see thee rise,
The True North strong and free!
And stand on guard, O Canada,
We stand on guard for thee.
 

 

O Canada! where pines and maples grow,
Great prairies spread, and lordly rivers flow.
How dear to us thy broad domain,
From East to Western sea.
The land of hope for all who toil,
The True North strong and free!

Now, that's a national anthem to be proud of.

A few weeks ago, I attended a game between the Mariners and the Toronto Blue Jays.  (The Mariners' first pitch was hit out of the park; they committed three of their four errors in the first three innings.)  Both national anthems were performed, of course, with the lyrics to both displayed on the screen. 

First "O Canada."  One notices immediately that the song is actually singable!  You don't need to be trained professionally in opera.  But beyond that, the lyrics are -- for the most part -- stirring and meaningful.  True North, indeed!  Great prairies, lordly rivers, land of hope.  These are attributes in a country that arouse pride.

Then the "Star Spangled Banner."  What can I say?  I don't want to belabor its problems.  Folks have complained about it for years.  Its musical range makes it difficult to sing, of course.  But beyond that, it was never intended to be a national anthem.  It was written as a poem commemorating a specific battle in the War of 1812 -- not one of our better wars .  It was set to the tune of an English drinking song, "Anacreon in Heaven" -- that's ok, lots of tunes are cannibalized for various reasons.  But still!  It didn't even become our national anthem until 1931.

What do we think of when we recall the lyrics?  Rockets red glare!  Bombs bursting in air!  Right?  Wars are sometimes necessary, as are bombs and rockets.  But do we really want to perpetuate these military images as the supreme image of America? 

The anthem has four verses.  We are nearly always subjected only to the first -- which goes on quite long enough as it is.  We need not ponder lines from later verses:

No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave.

And the minds of our chronically warlike presidents probably would not be additionally inflamed by recalling:

Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: "In God is our trust."

I don't propose scrapping "The Star Spangled Banner."  Its use is sanctified by history; too many citizens would be outraged and grieved if we were to jettison it at this late date.

But if only Congress had chosen "America the Beautiful," instead, back in 1931.  That lovely song is as singable as "O Canada!"  And it points to the qualities of America that truly arouse pride in all citizens:  "amber waves of grain," "purple mountains majesty," "the fruited plain," "brotherhood, from sea to shining sea."

Some phrases might seem tinged with irony: "thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears."  But these lines at least represent our aspirations, if not yet our accomplishments.  And in 2013, our cities do gleam compared with 1931; human tears, although still plentiful, now perhaps result more from frustrated aspirations than, as they did then, from existential problems of starvation, disease, and abject homelessness.

In any event, with the rest of the crowd, I was happy to stand for both anthems before the Toronto game.  It's been another bad year for Seattle.  More than half the fans appeared to be British Columbians sporting Blue Jay colors, fans who had driven all the way down for a midweek game.  They showed lots of enthusiasm. 

Which makes me wonder why Major League Baseball still hasn't expanded to Vancouver?

Where's your visa?

Less than two weeks until I fly to Istanbul and thence, after a couple of days to regain my composure, onward to Dushanbe (the capital of Tajikistan) (no, don't pretend you already knew that).

I wrote a few weeks ago of my joy in receiving my necessary visas.  Although one's always uncertain, I'm sure I conveyed my confidence that, whatever the delay, the visas would in good time be duly issued and stamped securely into my passport.  I never really worried that a tourist visa would not be issued.

But such, apparently, is not always the case.

Maeve, a fellow trekker I met four years ago while trekking in Nepal, is signed up for the same trek.  In fact, it was her recommendation that finally tipped me into choosing the Tajikistan trek rather than another one I had almost decided on, headed for Kyrgyzstan.  I've been looking forward to having a familiar face greet me amongst the ten other hikers.

I applied for my two visas (to Tajikistan and then Uzbekistan) in late May and mid-June.  She applied for hers shortly thereafter.  I had my visas within weeks.  She is still waiting.

She writes today that her passport isn't even in the hands of the local consulate, but has been referred back to the Motherland for review.  She some time ago submitted supplemental information requested by the consulate.  Both the trekking company and the American visa service that she uses have been attempting to push matters along.  She understands that the consulates, here in the U.S., will not accept an expedited processing fee because she travels on an Irish, not an American, passport.

So, nothing is certain in life.  Even bureaucratic red tape that one considers merely time- and effort-consuming can sometimes jump up in front of you and force life to grind to a complete stop.  When a government wants to look things over again, the fact that you are about to lose non-refundable airline fares and trekking company cancellation fees is quite immaterial to that government.

These are the complaints that non-Americans have made about travel to the United States for decades.  The refusal to hurry, the refusal to explain, the denial of visas without further comment -- these are experiences with American bureacracy of which most Americans may be unaware, but are all too familiar to tourists, students, and businessmen from other nations.  So, it's difficult to protest when another country adopts the same modus operandi in deciding whether to permit travel to their nation. 

To a Tajik official, protection of Tajik security no doubt looms as high in priority as do similar concerns to American State Department officals facing an application from a Tajik citizen.

It's simply too bad that it's an Irish citizen who's been chosen to show us how it feels.  The trekking company says not to panic.  Things may all fall into place at the last minute.  It's harrowing, but I hope they're right.

Brewster

Stories with an atmosphere of gothic horror are usually set in the rural South, not in familiar places like Putnam county, New York.  Brewster, by Mark Slouka, is an exception.

Slouka's Brewster, N.Y., is a working class town existing -- physically only, not socially or economically -- between New York City and Westchester county to the south and Woodstock to the north. The story is set in the late 1960s.   Bands of Woodstock-bound "hippies" hitchhike their way past Brewster on their way north.  The town and its residents are touched neither by the sophistication of the nearby big city, nor by the times in which they live.  They are people still dwelling in the 1940s, living in a cold, incurious world with narrow horizons.

Stop, children, what's that sound?  Even if we'd stopped, we wouldn't have heard a thing.

This frigid -- both physically and emotionally -- environment is the setting for Jon's story, the story of two high school students growing up in Brewster, and of their doomed friendship.  The narrator, Jon, is the son of Jewish survivors of the Nazi death camps.  Jon's older brother had died in an accident when Jon was four, a second calamity in his parents' life that had left them cold and detached.  Jon and his parents go through the motions of living together, walking about the house like unseeing ghosts.

Jon tells his story in terse, self-deprecating sentences.  He says that he does "all right" at school, but  he eventually is accepted at Columbia University.  He's not a "jock," but during the course of the book he is essentially drafted onto his school's track team, where he becomes an outstanding relay runner.

A loner, Jon drifts into an intensely close friendship with Ray, an odd, caustic guy who wanders about the school in a dark coat.  Ray is a fighter, a brawler, really.  He's neither jock nor scholar.  He exists on the fringes of high school society, looked down on by classmates.  We learn that he is beaten routinely by his single father, an ex-cop, an ex-soldier from World War II, a guy whose life has been on one long downhill trajectory. 

Stories about friendship between high school "brains" and "losers" aren't that rare.  I've never found these friendships convincing; nothing in my own high school experiences suggested their likelihood.  But Slouka makes it work.  Jon is a Jewish intellectual, but he's not timid, he's not overly "refined," and he's totally adrift from any security and sense of belonging that his own family might have offered him.  Ray's no scholar, but he's not stupid, and his reputation for brawling is, to a large degree, merely a cover for the obvious injuries he receives from his own father.  Ray's efforts to shield his infant brother from his father's abuse are touching, as is the romantic relationship that he eventually develops with Karen, a classmate who initially attracted Jon until Jon realized that Karen's feelings for him did not go beyond simple (but close) friendship.

Jon, Ray and Karen form a triumvirate of friendship, outside Brewster society, joined by an unlikely (but likeable) devout Christian -- Fred.  Except for Ray, these teenagers participate to some degree in Brewster student life without ever becoming part of it.  Each of them, in his own way, looks forward to the day they escape Brewster.  Jon and Ray dream of restoring an old car and driving off with Karen and maybe Fred to California -- the classical dream of disaffected American youth.

This plot synopsis doesn't do justice to the book, because so much of the book is a presentation of mood.  The loving description of all the markers of American "hip" civilization in the late '60s -- a civilization surrounding the kids but one that never really makes an impression on them.  The sense of Brewster as a a prison: a cold village, isolated from major trends in society, hostile to curiosity, to excitement -- where dreams go to die. 

And over all, the looming sense of danger -- hanging over the other senses of futility, of the impossibility of finding any joy or hope in one's life.  From the first chapter, we sense some menace threatening (not necessarily physically) Jon's life  -- threatening all four friends' lives -- a menace alluded to over and over as the narrative continues.  We gradually gain some idea of the source of the menace, and even of its nature.

But when we ultimately face the menace face to face, we're still shocked.  Shocked by Jon's graphic description of what he witnesses.  Shocked by its effect on each of the four friends' lives.  Shocked by the devastation visited on their friendship.

And shocked by our own appreciation -- an appreciation rarely encouraged by contemporary fiction -- that Evil sometimes actually exists.  Evil not subject to being minimized by our ability to be "understanding"  -- Evil fully worthy of being written with a capital letter.

North Rim

The magic of an outdoors weekend began Thursday night -- indoors, ironically -- at the Grand Canyon Lodge.  Having just arrived at the North Rim after a long day's drive from the Vegas airport, I was milling about with other guests in the sun room as the twilight deepened, enjoying a panoramic view of the canyon.  An historic piano, dating back to the lodge's early years, sat in the room with a "Display Only" sign on it.  Disregarding the sign without batting an eye, a scrawny kid -- very early teens in a ratty t-shirt and shorts, hair in his eyes -- plunked a few notes, and then dragged a chair over.  I was about to move outside to escape the inevitable "Chopsticks." 

But I froze in place as, from memory, the kid lit into the entire final movement from Beethoven's Pathétique Sonata.

The magic ended yesterday with a thud at the Las Vegas airport, where I was forced to hang out for eight hours surrounded by slot machines, as lightning storms delayed all flights.  I arrived home after 1 a.m. last night.

From the sublime to the frustrating.  But in between, happily, almost everything else was sublime.

The North Rim is remote, which is why it gets only ten percent of the park's visitors.  Six hours from Las Vegas, where I rented a car, by way of Zion National Park.  (Coming home, I discovered that the alternative route, by-passing Zion through the Kaibab Paiute Indian Reservation, is about an hour faster.)  Although the North Rim is only about seven miles "as the condor flies" from the South, it's a five hour drive by car or a twenty mile hike by trail.  The North Rim, at well over eight thousand feet, is about a thousand feet higher than the South -- and consequently cooler, greener, and more heavily forested.

Because of the travel time, I had only two full days -- Friday and Saturday -- at the park.  Friday, I spent exploring the lodge and its environs, walking a couple of trails that connected the lodge with a campground and general store a mile and a half away, driving three miles to Point Imperial (highest point on either rim at 8,803 ft.), and in general letting my body acclimate to elevations in the 8,000's.  The big event came the following day -- the descent into the canyon along the North Kaibab trail.

The North Kaibab runs from a point (8,250 ft.) about 1½ miles from the lodge down to the Colorado river at Phantom Ranch, 14 miles away.  Avid followers of my self-puffery will recall that a couple of years ago, I descended from the South Rim to the Colorado (to a point near, but not quite at, Phantom Ranch).  But that was a round trip of only 15 miles, not 28.  And that was in April -- snowy at the top, and maybe 70 at the river.  In August, the temperatures are about 75 at the top and close to 110 at the river.  Let me assure skeptics -- temperature does make a difference.  A big difference.

And so I decided to hike down only as far as Roaring Springs (5,200 ft.), about three thousand feet below the rim, and 9.4 miles round trip by trail.  Ground water percolates through successive layers of water-permeable sandstone and limestone until it reaches the layer of impermeable Bright Angel shale.  Unable to soak in any deeper, it pours out the side of the canyon as a large waterfall (several waterfalls, actually), dropping to Roaring Springs at the base of the Bright Angel shale stratum.  The strength of the falls, in such a dry canyon, is impressive.

The Park Service recommends that anyone doing a day hike to Roaring Springs begin no later than 6 a.m.  I fumbled around, grabbing a fast coffee and danish at the Saloon (opening at 5:30 a.m. as a coffee house), and driving to the parking lot 1.7 miles away.  I'd been told that the parking lot fills early, and I might have to walk from the lodge.  It was virtually empty.  I was on the North Kaibab trail at 6:20 a.m., and had the trail almost to myself all the way down.

The falls were impressive, as I've mentioned, and even more impressive was the hike back up as the sun rose ever higher in the sky.  I met many hikers on their way to Roaring Springs as I climbed back up, sleepy-heads who obviously hadn't hit the trail until near 9 a.m.  I pity them.  Under normal thermal conditions, the hike up would not be difficult, certainly not much more difficult than the Bright Angel trail between the South Rim and Indian Gardens -- but in August, the heat made it a killer.  Especially, that last mile from the top, after the Supai Tunnel.

I found myself resting and sipping water every few hundred yards, and I usually consume less water while hiking than do most.  I felt quite fatigued by the time I dragged myself up to the Rim.  One consolation for anyone planning to repeat my experience in August is that piped spring water is available at both Roaring Springs and the Supai Tunnel (1.7 miles from the top).  I did fine on the two liters of water I was carrying, even without reliance on these sources on the trail.

Total round trip time -- just over five hours.

Good dinners at the lodge, relaxation and reading on the lodge's terrace (where friendly waiters happily refresh your beer glass), people-watching (I could write a separate essay on the varieties of Americans and foreigners who gravitate to the North Rim), and, in general, a long, magical weekend.

The magic enhanced, of course, by my sense of accomplishment -- Roaring Springs in August!  (But I talked to enough fellow hikers, with greater ambitions, to give me a real hankering for what appears to be a very feasible Rim to Rim backpacking trip.  Some day in the future.  Maybe?)

Ender's Game

Yes, I do enjoy writing book reviews.  But I don't review War and Peace, or Gone with the Wind, or Les Misérables.  I don't review them, because everyone who would enjoy those classics has either read them already or already plans to read them at some point in the future.

Similarly, I won't review Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card.  Anyone interested in science fiction or fantasy knows about the book, at least, and probably read it long ago.  A much publicized movie based on the book is scheduled for release in the United States for November 1. 

The book was written in 1985, and it's my own fault that I just got around to reading it this week.  Mr. Card's writing is serviceable and adequate, but not particularly "literary" -- a fact that he acknowledges in a somewhat embarrassingly lengthy apology in the latest edition's preface.  But the story is absorbing, the characterization of the hero is moving, and the "message" is well worth noting. 

So I won't review the book -- its plot or character development -- but I do want to mention the "message" (or one of the messages) I find in that book.

The story, in quick summary, is that mankind, 150 years from now, has been engaged in battle twice by attacks from an alien species of bug-like humanoids that we call the "buggers."  Earth's forces have been sent -- by relativistic means -- across space to the buggers' own realm in the hope of defeating their forces before they regroup for a third attack.  Young Ender, a genius, has been bred and recruited, and is being trained, to direct these forces as supreme commander.

Most of the book is devoted to Ender's rapid development from a six-year-old child to an eleven-year-old conquering hero.  Ender's forces not only defeat the buggers, but totally annihilate their species, opening up their own planets for Terrestial expansion.

But Ender learns, after the celebrations conclude, that the buggers were far more civilized than we had given them credit for.  More civilized than ourselves.  Because of their own physiological functioning, they had believed that Earth was uninhabited by intelligent life, and that humans were simply robots left from an earlier and now departed civilization.  They realized their mistake after the second battle.  They therefore had no intention of ever launching a third attack.  Their "queen," realizing that defeat and annihilation were inevitable, and that Ender had the empathy to appreciate what she would tell him, found a way to leave Ender a message; her message told him that the buggers had never intended harm to an intelligent species.  Nevertheless, they accepted their fate, and she recognized that humans were now the heirs of what the bugger civilization had accomplished.  She wished them well.

Ender, now 12-years-old, and the toast of humanity, realizes that he has unnecessarily caused the death of billions of civilized beings, and an annihilation of their entire civilization.  He is devastated, despite the assurance of adults that man is evolutionarily a killer, that killing is the key to survival, and that survival is the ultimate goal of any species. 

A nation that came close to wiping out its own indigenous Indian population, enslaved Africans, attacked Spanish possessions without reasonable provocation, dropped its second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, replaced democratic governments with dictatorships in Chile and other Latin American countries, and accepted devastating "collateral damage" in Southeast Asia and Afghanistan, should have no difficulty in understanding the weight of Enver's self-accusing guilt, and in asking similar questions about its own policies.

The lesson is not that we should never kill.  It's that we must develop the empathy to understand our supposed adversaries before we ever resort, as a final alternative, to killing.

So far, humanity has never totally obliterated an entire intelligent species (unless, perhaps, we count whatever homo sapiens did to the Neanderthals, which I don't).  But we still have 150 years to hone our abilities.

Show your ticket

“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”
― Ernest Hemingway

Trust sometimes proves unjustified.

Sound Transit's light rail line between the airport and downtown has been running for nearly four years.  Fares are enforced by a modified honor system.  You buy a ticket, or click your prepaid card, before boarding the train.  Occasionally, enforcement officers board the train and check to make sure everyone has paid his fare.  The fine for being on the train without proof of payment is -- as I recall -- $144.

I love the airport line, and use it regularly.  During the first year or so, officers frequently boarded the train.  More recently, not so much.  I suspect that most travelers from the airport itself -- many of them visitors from other cities -- pay their fare.  I'm less sure about local residents who board at intermediate stations.

Sometimes I leave a baseball game at Safeco field and take the light rail to downtown -- just four stops away.  I virtuously click my card getting on board. The machine beeps loudly. I don't hear many other beeps. Hoards of basefall fans ignore the fare. 

The system isn't working. 

I note that Los Angeles has had the same problem.  They switched several months ago from an honor system similar to ours to the turnstile system used by most other subway systems.  As the New York Times wrote, back in May:

“A lot of people — if not the majority of people — are not paying their fare,” said Zev Yaroslavsky, a county supervisor and a member of the board of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority. “There is no reason for them to pay. The odds of them getting a ticket are slim to none.”

My concern does, I admit, concern me.  It's been less than a month since I blogged my lamentation at how easily and irrationally I became irritated at drivers who didn't display current license tabs.  But it's difficult to finance an expanding rapid transit system, and to persuade voters to subsidize it.  If we want to provide free transit to everyone -- one possible approach -- the system should be sold to voters with that understanding.  Instead, voters have understood that a significant proportion of light rail's costs would derive from passenger fares.

And the problem goes beyond lost revenue to the issue of fairness.  As Mr. Yaroslavsky was quoted as saying, in the Times article:

“It’s not fair to those people who pay to have a significant percentage of people who don’t pay,” he said. “The credibility of the enforcement system is undermined. It’s human nature to say, ‘If he’s getting away with it, why should I pay?’ ”

Reconfiguring stations to include turnstiles and ticket readers will not be cheap.  But cost savings in the long run, both in fares and in renewed public confidence, justify the initial investment.

And the transformation should be undertaken before 2016, when the two new stations of the University extension open for business.

Sound Transit has tried trusting transit riders.  We've learned we can't trust them.

Tempus fugit

Just yesterday, I told myself that "we have a whole summer ahead of us."  Now, I find myself entering the second week of August.  Leaves on roadside bushes are beginning to turn yellowish and reddish.  The days are hot -- we've had a magnificent summer in the Northwest Corner -- but the evenings are noticeably cooler.  A few weeks ago, it was broad daylight at 5 a.m. and 9 p.m.

Now it's not.

So the summer is anticipated, it's greeted joyfully, and -- before you know it -- it's on its way out.

'Twas not always thus.  Why, when I was a kid, it took an eternity of yearning for school to be out and summer to be in -- but once here, summer went on forever.  Whatever happened?

Theories abound as to why time seems to go by faster as we get older.  My favorite has always been the proportion theory -- three months is a far greater percentage of your lifetime to date when you're ten than when you're fifty, and so three months seem to last longer when you're younger.  The theory is attractive, but scientists have questioned whether we really consider our life as a totality when judging the passage of time.

Claudia Hammond has come out with a book that discusses this question, together with many other questions related to our perception of time: Time Warped.  I haven't read the book yet, satisfying myself with scanning a number of reviews.  Hammond suggests that time goes by more slowly when we are young because we find ourselves confronted during those years with a large number of new experiences, each of which demands our close attention.  As we grow older, we tend to glide through life on cruise control, half awake while experience passes us by.  

[S]he argues that the real reason for the quickening of time is that a high concentration of strong memories occur in the teens and 20s, making that period a “benchmark for our judgments of retrospective time.” As new memories become sparser, later life seems brief compared with our eventful youth, giving the illusion that time has sped up.¹

This depressing theory has some intuitive appeal, and may explain the frantic desire for new experiences that many of us subconsciously feel as we age and our teen years recede swiftly into the past.

On the other hand, Hammond also notes that time seems to pass more swiftly when we are intently focused on absorbing activities than when we are sitting around being bored.  Apparently, we are faced with a trade-off between time passing quickly while we're actively engaged in interesting activities and time seeming to have passed more slowly in retrospect -- in other words, an active two-week vacation seems to go by quickly but -- when we look back on it -- we feel it lasted much longer than two weeks.

An interesting quandary.  But maybe only in theory.  I've had a fairly active and interesting summer, and yet -- here we are -- with those leaves already starting to turn.  It was still too fast a summer.  I guess the only real solution would be to wake up and find myself a 15-year-old again.  But like all too many "solutions," that too would have its own unintended (because thankfully forgotten) consequences.      
-----------------------------------
¹Jascha Hoffman, New York Times (August 5, 2013).              

Skyline Trail

The Skyline Trail Loop starts out at Paradise Lodge in Mt. Rainier National Park, circles about a canyon to the east, reaches a high point of 6,800 feet at Panorama Point, and gradually descends back to the lodge.  A six-mile walk, with a 1,400 foot elevation gain, the hike has been given a difficulty rating of "4" by a guidebook that I use, compared with a "5" for the climb to Camp Muir (which I discussed two years ago).

If the Skyline Loop is a "4," I'd be required to rate Camp Muir a "fifteen"!  But although the hike was not that difficult, it certainly had its small challenges as well as offering the hiker exposure to magnificent scenery.

Even on a Monday, Paradise in August is crammed with tourists, with the only parking some distance from the lodge.  There's an old hikers' joke:

The density of hikers on the trail is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the trailhead and the cube of the elevation above the trailhead.

Nevertheless, I found a considerable number of hikers on the trail, all the way up to Panorama Point -- from small kids to elderly folks who wouldn't have surprised me if they had needed help just to get from their car to the lodge. 

Visitors to Paradise were putting forth their best efforts today, determined to get beyond the gift shop and climb as high as they were able.

The day was mostly clear, and the mountain was majestic (see photo above).  The wild flowers are reaching their peak.  Much of the upper trail, as you approach Panorama Point from the east, is still covered with snow, and the final climb involved a steep traverse of a steep snow field, requiring constant effort to ensure that your boot soles were cutting firmly into the snow.  A high route exists, however, taking the hiker over the top of the snow field, at the cost of another half mile in distance, and many hikers were electing to follow that route.  (Most of the less able hikers were both climbing and descending the western portion of the loop, which is a shorter distance to Panorama Point than the eastern route, and is also largely free of snow.)

So the climb was exhilarating, if less taxing than expected.  I do need to complete one or two more difficult climbs, however, as conditioning before my trek in September.

Subjective admissions

How do you win admission to the college of your choice?  Bookstores are full of advice, and an entire industry has evolved devoted to helping kids take standardized examinations, get high grades, and prepare winning applications.

In yesterday's New York Times, Ruth Starkman talks about it from the Admission Office's point of view.  A couple of years ago, Starkman became an "outside reader" of applications for admission to Berkeley, one of seventy persons not otherwise affiliated with the university who handled one early phase in establishing rankings of Berkeley's 53,000 applications. 

Berkeley, like many schools, uses a "holistic" approach to admissions, meaning that admissions aren't based simply on a mathematical calculation of GPA and SAT numbers.  The university seeks to achieve "diversity" -- which now must be diversity of socio-economic background, rather than race -- as well as to achieve a balance among various student interests, personalities, and talents.  Berkeley, and the UC schools in general, thus attempt to apply the same subjective approach to admissions that has long been used by most upper tier private schools.

Starkman found the process confusing and not only subjective, but uncomfortably subjective.

My job as an application reader — evaluating the potential success of so many hopeful students — had been one of the most serious endeavors of my academic career. But the opaque and secretive nature of the process had made me queasy. Wouldn’t better disclosure of how decisions are made help families better position their children?

She didn't volunteer for a second year.

Long ago, I was the beneficiary of such a holistic approach by the university of my choice.  I had extremely high SAT scores.  I had a good -- but, certainly by today's inflated numbers, not spectacular  -- GPA.  I was rather active in the sort of student activities (the nerdy sort, like writing and drama) in which I was active.  I would have scored no points whatsoever for athletic prowess.  I had no obvious musical or artistic talents.  If we had ever heard of start-up companies, I wasn't the sort of high school geek who might have started one up.  I came from a small town, outside the state of California, and from a high school that was decent, but with no pretensions of excellence.

I never took a course to help me write an application essay.  Indeed, I reached the post office with my application in hand, realized that I still hadn't filled in the essay portion of the form, and dashed one off with a post office pen. 

Somehow, in balance, something about my application appealed to someone who counted, and my particular combination of qualities filled some sort of niche -- facts for which I've been forever grateful.  Would I have been admitted on strictly quantifiable data?  Maybe. Who knows?  I recently read an article by a fellow graduate of my university, now a prominent writer, who recalled spending four years as an undergraduate praying that whatever error had led to her admission would not be discovered until after she had graduated.

I knew the feeling.  And I know I wasn't alone.

But I digress into reminiscence.  Starkman's primary concern, I think, is that the subjectivity of Cal's admissions process leads to "unfairness" in admissions.  For a private school, this is less a concern.  Harvard and Yale can decide what kind of student body they want, and admit whomever might help them achieve that goal.  If that means admitting an excellent oboeist whose grades are lower than many unsuccessful applicants -- well, that's their prerogative.  No one has a right to be a Harvard grad.

For public universities, funded by the public and subject to suspicious observation by the legislature, the situation is a bit dicier.  The cry -- expressed by some comments to the Starkman essay -- is for a return to a mathematical cut-off, with no subjectivity.  If schools were to rely solely on SAT scores, uniform across the nation, this might be feasible, but no one wants to admit students based solely on their arguably innate abilities.  The best indication of whether an applicant will successfully complete his degree is what he has done with those "abilities" throughout four years of high school.

But once we start looking at the more reliable numbers of GPA, we re-enter the world of subjectivity.  A 4.0 average from a big city school with some selectivity (or self-selectivity) -- like Garfield in Seattle -- is not necessarily the same as a 4.0 from a small rural school in northern Idaho.  And the fact that many GPAs are today adjusted to recognize good work in AP classes -- so that a 4.40 average is now quite possible -- may increase the fairness of comparisons between students from different schools in some respects, but also prejudices kids applying from smaller schools unable to offer AP classwork.

I suspect "fair admissions" is an illusory goal, and the term is more useful as PR, a term designed to placate the tax-paying public.  Like private schools, public schools are forced to decide the kind of student body they seek, and to admit students who help achieve that goal.  That doesn't mean that the Cal student body would ideally be the same as the Stanford student body.  Being a public university system does force the UC schools -- politically -- to work harder in seeking representation from diverse factions of the state. 

 But the "disclosure" that Starkman believes the university should make to parents and their children should be an honest disclosure that admission is not a reward for doing everything right, or evidence that the admittees are "better," "smarter" or "more worthy" than those denied admission.  Admission from that large pool of students who are all obviously capable of university level study should be viewed as a lottery, an act of grace, one that serves the needs and goals of the university rather than rewards the unquantifiable merits of the applicants.

Such a disclosure would be honest and it would be transparent.  But it probably wouldn't be acceptable to a public that firmly believes in a hypothetical system capable of judging one 18-year-old as being more or less worthy than another for college admission.  And it might not, in the long run, be advantageous to a university that holds itself out as not only being diverse and representative, but also being highly meritocratic, the crown jewel of the California system of universities.

Continued reliance on a certain degree of hokum and bunkum in discussing college admissions, in other words, may be to everyone's advantage.