Freud was wrong.
    Life is stories. Some stories last only a day. In fact, most of them. Most are finished almost as soon as they are told. But by the end of the day they have to be told. Maybe even more than once. When you see that idiot in her SUV with that cellphone to her ear, you can bet your last dollar there's a story involved...a story that couldn't wait. To have stories, to tell them and to hear them is to be human.  In their telling life goes on...until the next story. The story is the most basic human expression of hope.
    But other stories have legs, as they say in the business. A first kiss, a first love, a trip to Disney World, a war no one expected, the loss of a loved one, a sickness, an accident. All these stories take some time in the retelling, for they must be mulled over and over and over in the mind before they can be spoken out loud, or put to paper. These are stories with plots and chapters.
    In anthropological terms, stories are "survival enhancing", not just for an individual, but for a family, a community, even a peoples. Without stories and an outlet for stories, life changes. It becomes darker. It can become meaningless.
    Let me give you two examples and you will see what I mean.
    In 1978 the people of Iran lived under a benign despot called the Shah. He was a king with near absolute power, had a secret police, an army that jumped as his command, and a cosmopolitan Islamic nation that had the highest standard of living in the Middle East. Most of the people scarcely noticed the awful power the Shah possessed, for he rarely used it against them. The Persian people have the most mellifluous language in the world, even more so than Arabic, a delightful and gregarious personality, enjoy good food and wearing colorful attire. They loved to shop, ski, hunt, and sit at cafes drinking chai or kafe...and tell stories.
     But there was something in their personality that made them feel that it wasn't enough. Indeed, it wasn't enough, but that is a different story. While they were the most modern of Muslim states, Barbara Walters insulted the Shah by telling him on national television that he was moving too slow on liberating women. She made him look petty to the world. Many Persians traveled abroad to get educations in pursuits for which there were no jobs in Iran. There was only oil and oil-related industry in Iran. And rug-making. Underwater basket weaving in the Persian Gulf was but a dream, several generations away from ever being a reality, although southern California universities had been giving degrees in that discipline for years. So, many young Iranians were disgruntled, and being young, took their anger out on the recently belittled head of the nation without clearly thinking about the alternatives. (This is not intended to be an allegory about the most recent election in America, but it may fit. Time will tell.)
    As with all modernizing Islamic nations, there was an underbelly of disquiet among Muslims who generally dislike anything modern, especially the clothes women wore, with all those bumps and bulges that are supposed to be left unseen under Moslem teachings (sic).
    End of story. In 1979 the Persian people invited back the Ayatollah Khomeini, who had been in exile in France, and very quickly a revolution established him as supreme leader, an Islamic Republic was announced, and all of sudden, almost over night, every woman in Iran was wearing a long black, loose fitting smock that went all the way down over the ankles and a matching head scarf.
    I'm not sure when the women (and most men) of Iran actually began to regret that little foot-stomping fit they threw back in '78. But we know they did at some time shortly thereafter. Only it was too late.
    That was almost thirty years ago, and while the itch to be free of those drab rags and other restrictions over their public lives grows daily, the boot of oppression on their neck grows heavier and heavier with every passing day. Why this is so is because they invoked certain natural laws of totalitarianism that take on a life of their own. Even the French and Spanish pale when up against middle Eastern bureaucrats.
    The point of this little excursion into ethnic teat-fits is why that 30 year mark is so important. You see, in Iran right now, over half the population have never known life without that black garb and the religion police. To them, life, while dull, is also normal. Iran is at a crucible, for every day a little bit of the memory of how things used to be dies out, replaced with a generation who has known nothing else. In another twenty years it will almost all be lost.
    What saves Iran is her stories. All they have now are the stories...the stories told by mothers to daughters inside their homes, where they can still pull out old clothes from the wardrobe and play dress up and dream just a little. But at 30 years, even these exercises can become risky, for school children are taught to snitch out their own parents, just like they are in Massachusetts, or to eavesdrop other school children to find out who's having forbidden thoughts and dreams.
    Right now Iran survives on her stories. Her future rests on those stories, for they are all they have. At least that's how my side of the coin looks at it. Socialism, of course, doesn't see things this way. But now you understand what the anthropologists mean by "survival-enhancing."
    Onto Case No. 2. Let's go to any of the east European Soviet Bloc countries in the mid-1980s, before perestroika, glasnost and the fall of the empire. Forget Russia here, for at the time of their revolution the people had no memory of freedom, even limited freedom, so they simply jumped from the tsarist frying pan into the Bolshevik fire. This explains the quaint little folk belief among some orthodox country folk that even in heaven there is a "grief room" where a person can look down upon, and share the misery of their children still left behind.
    By 1985 in Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and East Germany the communist had been in charge for just over forty years...not that much longer than where Iran now sits. Still, one would have had to be over fifty to recall any sort of life before the Red Army swooped in to liberate them. And in a nation where life expectancy from that earlier generation was scarcely over 60, that ain't a lot. Moreover, like Russia, 80% of their peoples (except Germany) were rural folks who really had no memory (stories) of gay clothes, shoes, and sidewalk cafes with kafe and cakes in the first place. Uneducated country folk, not college professors, were the quickest to dump Christianity (proving Lenin wrong), and Slovakia's secession from Czechoslovakia proved they kinda liked what socialism was selling...you know, the taking from city folks and giving to country folks.
    Had it not been for the church, especially in Roman Catholic east Europe, by 1985 there were almost no stories that could be told to children about how life would someday be without imperial communism. I recall throughout the 1990s visiting Orthodox churches and watching great-grandmothers teaching 5 and 6 year old's how to cross themselves and genuflect...because neither their parents nor grandparents, had any knowledge of these rites. How can anyone see such a thing and not be moved? Were it not for the samizdat network, bootleg "Dallas" TV shows, rock and roll and blue jeans there would have been no dreams of an afterlife at all.
    So, what about the stories? Here's yet another way stories keep life, and hope, going. You see, when friends gather at the end of the day, over coffee, they have to tell their stories of the day's events. Only there were none. What can a clerk in a communist system say? That he saw an interesting signature or a misspelling on the document he was about to rubber stamp? Under communism the lucky ones got to work in mills or plants or mines and die before they were 50 from black or brown lung, or get killed in a roof fall. At least they had stories. Things were interesting.
    For every front line worker in the mines, driving a truck, swinging a scythe,  there were armies of clerical "support" just pushing papers from one stamping station to the next. Their only real job under socialism was to be at an appointed place at an appointed time. That was what they called "full employment". There was this great Samizdat art from Russia (we're looking for it now to put on our website) that illustrates this. It was of a three-tiered puppet, showing one man at the bottom with a pick, and above him four men with pens, and above them another eight, also with pens. Thirteen men to dig one hole. Get it?
    Worse than no work at all, these people couldn't even sit around and complain about the boss. All the walls have ears under socialism, you know. Get used to it.
    When there are no stories all hope is lost, and that is where the Soviet Empire was after forty years. And it could be seen on their faces. There is something about despair that deadens the eyes and is worn like a fifty pound weight around the neck. People spoke of alcoholism among the Soviets, and I suppose there was a lot, especially on the job. But in their saloons, where men in America would go to curse their boss or their fate, Russian men would simply look down into the bottom of their glass, take long swallows and drink themselves into a stupor. Bruckner's 6th, anyone? They reminded me of old honky-tonk bars where there would always be that one single cow-poke in a dark corner, staring down the neck of a Blue Ribbon and pumping nickel after nickle into the juke-box, listening to Patsy Cline's "Sweet Dreams". But even here, the Russians had to keep their music to themselves.
    It is true, the management class gets to have its stories. It was probably the only reason many people joined the Party in the 50s and 60s. I suspect especially among the young who voted for the socialists, many see the coming socialism as an exciting time because they will be in the forefront, part of management. To be short and to the point; 'taint so. Oh, there will be bushels of titles to pass around, but socialist management is not all it's been hyped up to be. In the little puppet example above, they are the eight guys at the top; glorified clerks.
    But even as life at the middle may have stories, still cultural memory is lost, and this is where socialism, even among it greatest dreamers, like Al Gore, make their biggest mistake. The loss of cultural memory, among anthropologists, is "culturally endangering", and under socialism, while it may not be the intent, it is definitely the result of socialism.
    When I spent my first winter in the USSR, in 1991, every host I had, from Kiev to Kharkov to Moscow to Gorkii, first took me out to see the architecture of the pre-Soviet days, as a way to compare the crap they had to live and work in. Even top party bosses acknowledged this...but it was 1991 and they knew the handwriting was on the wall. They were only schmoozing me.
    When I travel there, even now, I still try to stay at the old Party hotels, where ever they may be. In Sofia, I always stay at the Rila, where at one time there was a pool of sunfish in front of a protected drive, where Black Maria's would drive up and discharge their prestigious passengers, escorted by waiting security guards. It was not a place strangers could go in to just "look around." That pool was first only fetid water, then an empty yard for dogs to crap in and gypsies to sleep in, and is now an outdoor beer cafe. That's progress.
    But inside the hotel? First class bedrooms looked out into the mountains, from the front of the hotel, while second class looked out over the peeling paint of smaller buildings behind the hotel. Foreigners always got first class. And first class, in 1990, at the time of the fall, was a square queen sized bed, standard commie issue, a door onto a 20" balcony with loose railing, which could never be entirely closed...nor would you want to for even in the winter there was only one setting on the heater...hot, and some chance of gas poisoning. There was a mini-fridge, which in 15 years, I've never known to freeze water. The tub is a thing of beauty, deeper by 6 inches than American tubs, and hooked up to a series of external pipes that allow the bather to take a shower, assuming he can figure out the four knobs in the right sequence...and the city is allowing hot water that day.
    Point number one, is, 1990, when communism fell in Bulgaria, this was as good as it got, even though there had been real luxury there in 1940. This was for the bosses, the elite of the elite. This is where they brought their babes! Bulgaria started out with a Waldorf Astoria and ended up with a Motel 6 in just forty five short years. Historians will try to tell you that history does not go backward, but it does. Europe proved it in the 5th Century. So did the Soviets in the 20th....taking us to Point number two.
    While the management class of socialism may have stories, after a fashion, making their status survivable in the anthropology sense, they have no power over cultural memory. Think of it this way. In the thinking of Al Gore's socialism, he loves luxury, and believes it should be held for the leadership (only) to enjoy. In truth he sees this as a hereditary form of nobility, a la the French, for not in Al Gore's wildest dreams (not to mention Tipper's) does he not also imagine his grandchildren and great grandchildren occupying a similar status in a future socialist regime.
    You see, Gore lives in  a mansion now, and so will his great grandchildren...only their will be more like a Motel 6 by comparison. And they will never know.
    If the death of stories and loss of hope were a cake, the loss of cultural memory will be its maraschino cherry.
VB