A Solace In Sentences

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”It’ll get easier. Someday it’ll all be done by machine. Information machines.” Gravity’s Rainbow

I’m stranded in this Sargasso moment, awash above the blank pages in a sea of bewilderment, bordering too often on despair or at least demoralization, questioning who we are and what we are to do, placing words on screen or paper, that appear too often useless. How can I meet the YouTube moment, while whole contraptions made out of outmoded words, float like garish headlines against images appearing for short moments and then gone, while the world arranges itself around another passing crisis. What is it that endures against the nihilistic forces that stalk across the earth. like a million metaphorical monsters, puncturing every dream and aspiration for no apparent purpose, outside of the blind and momentary pleasure of watching things explode.

In my local community I’m like a ghost. What do I have to communicate besides brittle hope or the pain of loss? So much is lost to stupidity and greed. The question is, what remains?

I find some escape in the oceanic and ancient desert landscapes of this beautiful state as it flows past my car windows. I indulge in the exquisite paragraphs of my favorite writers, the best of them having been with me almost as long as I can remember.

I grew up in a post-war world of weekly air raid sirens and useless nuclear drills. I’d seen pictures of the bombs going off above Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and watched as ex Nazi Werner von Braun on Disney, explained the nuclear reaction using ping pong balls and mousetraps. I endlessly fantasized about fallout shelters. My family drove past fields full of surplus tanks and obsolete aircraft on our way to church, all of this hardware useless in a war of total obliteration. I watched movies at Saturday matinees that featured mutant monsters wandering through the wreckage of civilizations. Most of my nightmares were of inescapable destruction.

The fathers of my generation gathered in VFW halls. They shared the fellowship of men and women who’d survived through a holocaust. They were often reluctant to reveal to their children any details of the horrors they’d encountered and survived. With fascination, we gleaned fragments and artifacts of memory from books and photographs. We watched television documentaries, roughly cut in black and white, narrated by Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow, of battles and bombardments and ruined cities. There were the romanticized exploits in popular movies staring our favorite movie stars, portraying sacrifice, heroism and always victory. There were the morality plays of the TV westerns that dominated the evenings. As boys our favorite backyard fantasies featured plastic guns and makeshift arsenals. We retreated from history into our imaginations, and I guess it served as our defense against a backdrop of terror.

Amidst the doom and gloom and people taking themselves too seriously, there were other things to think about. Our childhoods, like every childhood, were filled with discovery and wonder. A fresh world of technological possibilities was opening all around us. Television itself was new. We launched ourselves into space, and the pace of ambition and invention was rapidly altering the landscape.

We thought about careers and success, and believed in times of growing tolerance and opportunities. Still, many of us found ourselves stranded in a marsh of questions and indecision. As the decades passed, we entered an extended interval of useless and dangerous conflict, of burning cities, assassination of our heroes, and a rising sense that civilization itself had an uncertain future. For those who stepped off the shores of safe and sound behavior, the plunge into unknown waters took a healthy sense of humor and a strong dose of aspiration, or at least enough momentum to move forward.

When I was 17 years old, I often wandered through the fiction racks in the downtown branch of the Carnegie library in my hometown, Cleveland. One day amid a display of the latest contemporary novels, I looked upon a thick and serious hardcover volume, with a single letter, V. , as its title. The letter stood monumental, upon a surrealistic plane of parallel lines converging toward a vanishing point, beneath an empty blue sky. In the foreground, in smaller letters below, the words proclaimed, A NOVEL BY THOMAS PYNCHON. Something about that image and title suited the world as I’d begun to see it, a mysterious and isolating landscape of endless searching and uncertainty. Like Pynchon’s characters in this, his first novel, my friends and I moved among bewildering scenarios with sensibilities that blended both hopefulness and paranoia. Like Pynchon’s Whole Sick Crew , we wandered amid the moral confusion that followed the chaos and tragedy of a World War. Underneath it all there lingered the frightening suspicion that everything that might have made sense to our parents was on the edge of coming apart.

Thomas Pynchon writes in the words of a prophet, a comedian, a poet of times of transition, when one world collapses into another, and people find themselves somewhat lost, seeking some kind of anchor in the tempest. His novels are mysteries. They take us, along with their sketchily drawn protagonists, to witness worlds both bizarre and familiar, packed with lush detail, profoundly beautiful and monstrously grotesque, full of both darkness and hilarity. His characters, as they search for patterns that might reveal some sense of ultimate purpose, skirt the edges of discovery, driven forward by circumstance, picking up messages and signs that hopefully provide clues, or at least an indication of direction. Each of his novels takes us through the beauty and violence of landscapes in a different period of history.

We hang out with Benny Profane with his whole sick crew and Herbert Stencil in search of a mysterious woman the 1950’s, follow Oedipa Maas through a Northern California real estate maze uncovering an underground postal system, Tyrone Slothrop caught in the Londan blitz and the boundryless zones of Europe at the end of World War Two, Zoyd Wheeler protecting and searching for a daughter between the tumult of the Nixon years and Reagan’s War On Drugs, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon in the 1709’s measure the border that will split America against itself, the Chums Of Chance fly above the realms of fantasy and possibility between the 1893 Columbian Exhibition and the ‘War To End All Wars’, ‘Doc’ Sportello tracks down a mysterious Golden Fang cartel of dentists at the tail end of the 60’s, Maxine Tarnow navigates New York and the internet between the dotcom crash and 911, Hicks McTaggart is caught between prohibition and the rise of fascism in Europe and in the USA.

Thousands of characters make an apoearance. Pynchon’s style is said to be encyclopedic, and it is, dealing not merely with characters and events, but with the sensibilities of every moment moment, where the mythical blends into the factual and the imaginative informs the real. He surveys the fleeting joys, horrors, and absurdities of the times. We shift among as many points of view as there are situations, and at times his people break into songs and poetry, even limericks, to illuminate the mood. Pynchon’s writing challenges and often breaks many of the conventions of prose, as if he’s daring us to trade in our box of expectations for a new sense of freedom.

There are dozens of essays and books written about and/or inspired by Pynchon, and as many interpretations of his work. I can offer my own, although it’s continually under revision. Like a trickster he challenges us to see through the patterns of history into worlds always in flux, driven as much by imagination as intent, old orders always collapsing while new ones arrive, never quite reaching a conclusion. We see humanity in a constant struggle between opposing urges of freedom and control, and beneath all the hopes, the curiosity and the paranoia, find no final answer beyond the absolute mystery of beginnings and endings, and everything inbetween.

Pynchon is one of the most influential writers of his generation. He certainly influenced me. Through the years every one of his reviewers and readers has attempted to plumb the mysteries and meanings that thread through his voluminous work. The worlds he creates are equally beautiful and monstrous, and each is a maze littered with both absurdity and wisdom. Pynchon himself is a cipher, almost never photographed never sitting for an interview. As far as I know he’s never offered explanations outside of his work, thus leaving conclusions fully to the reader.

My personal enjoyment is in his magnificent sentences, lush and long, often the length of a whole page or paragraph, exquisite and wanting to roll off the tongue, more like poetry than prose, or maybe something in between. They are filled with the beautiful, the mundane, the grotesque, enigmatic and the profound, and the sheer adventure in rereading them has gotten me through these very difficult times.

Here’s an example, from ‘Against The Day’.

Yashmeen’s white tall figure, parasol over her shoulder, already a ghost in full sunlight, went fading into the crowds flowing in and out through the trees between the quay and the Piazza Grande…

…Plum and pomegranate trees were coming into flower, incandescently white and red. The last patches of snow had nearly departed the indigo shadows of south-facing stone walls, and sows and piglets ran oinking cheerfully in the muddy streets. Newly parental swallows were assaulting humans they considered intrusive. At a cafe off Katunska Ulica near the marketplace, Cyprian, sitting across a table from the cooing couple (whose chief distinction from pigeons, he reflected, must be that pigeons were more direct about shitting on one), at great personal effort keeping his expression free of annoyance, was visited by a Cosmic Revelation, dropping from the sky like pigeon shit, namely that Love, which people like Bevis and Jacintha no doubt imagined as a single Force at large in the world, was in fact more like the 333,000 or however many different forms of Brahma worshipped by the Hindus—the summation, at any given moment, of all the varied subgods of love that mortal millions of lovers, in limitless dance, happened to be devoting themselves to. Yes, and ever so much luck to them all.

America In The Squeeze

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Guns versus smartphones

I’m just turning 75. My life has been formed, and is almost completed, throughout a breathtakingly brief and cataclysmic era in global history. In future accounts it may be referred to as ‘The Neoliberal Era’, ‘The Era Of American Hegemony’, ‘The Age Of Economic Globalization’, or perhaps, as the cataclysm intensifies toward its resolution, ‘Capitalism’s Final Crisis’. There will be a few references to something called ‘The American Empire’. It will appear as a flicker between the centuries, and one of the shortest lived empires that ever endured.

We are at the beginning of a 2nd American Revolution, one that is long due. Whatever the outcome, it will radically reshape the outcomes for global civilization. The age of the nation state is gradually going out of phase with the needs of the physical world. There will be times of breakdown and struggle. We must reintegrate with the workd. This will take some time and will never be at an end. I believe that in the next phase there will still be nations, and languages and cultural boundaries. The dimensions of power will be altered in structure and better managed, through education and the cultivation of respect. The flows of the twin rivers will be, at least until the next glacial scale disruption, in better harmony, as each distinctive part realizes its necessity to the whole.

Technology presents new perceptual models of the world much faster than anything we can control or even keep up with. We are continually confused. The time has arrived for us all to take a deep dive into questioning who we are and who we want to be, and what are the ultimate stakes. Complacency is deadly. We’d been so long buried in our own work, forgetting our reasons for working, or what makes up the whole mechanism of our survival.

We generally see and enterpret the word ’revolution’ to refer to specific cataclysmic changes in the procession of historical events. To understand what moves these events it’s necessary to go beyond specific dates and times and logistical patterns, and embrace the flowing evolutionary trends, ever constant, ever shifting, beneath the surface of what we see.

There are two constant revolutions/evolutions going on at any given historical moment. One is economic, and the other is cultural. They are woven together in close procession, at times in harmony, and at other times they appear to flow in opposing directions. The economic evolution is by nature conservative, its primary focus to preserve stability. Economics is a measure of the river of things, the movement of necessities and the produce of our desires.

Cultural evolution is something broader and more ephemeral, and yet central to our sense of well being. Something within us is driven by an impulse to break the rules, to advance, and to enter new territories. We are curious and inspired. Culture is the river of our perceptions. They are sometimes clear and accurate, and at other times only marginally connected to the world beneath the fog.

These twin streams never stop moving, never stop changing. They are inseparably linked, either energizing or obstructing each other, acting over and through us like the ancient gods in Greek tales about siblings and rivals.

It’s becoming abundantly and existentially clear to much of humanity that survival depends on a true understanding of the role we play as part of a bigger organism. Globalization is the political term for an economic transition. We go from centralized industrial production to widely distributed supply chains stretching across oceans and continents. At its essence, this is like the early evolution of the cell. A number of independent organisms come together as a cooperative community and eventually merge into a single complex organism. A process called symbioses.

Along with economic revolutions, cultural revolutions advance at an unprecedented rate, driven by the tides of information that flow through the system, reshaping at every instance our perception of the world.

We are currently engaged in a third world war, which is a new kind of war, fought with numbers and ideas and conceptual systems playing across screens. The handheld weapon in this war is the smartphone in our pockets.

Things are moving very fast, worldwide…one event or action leads to others. People find out who their allies are. They’re encouraged to become more boldly resistant. A major university resists a government takeover. Prominent financial managers begin speaking out. Republican Town Meetings get rowdy. People, in general, are educating themselves. All of this builds toward an ultimate breakdown of life as usual.

Kilmer Abrego Garcia, like George Floyd before him, like Alfred Dreyfus long before all of this (see ‘Dreyfus Affair), is an unfortunate victim of history. On April 19th, demonstrations, even more enormous than on the 5th, will expand the focus beyond Musk and Trump to embrace and defend Garcia, and his young family, and ourselves, against the fascist brutality that landed him in a living hell.

Trump and company are waiting for an opportunity to gin up excuses to go after dissenters, with fierce repression, just as they did during the George Floyd era. Just like then, only more so, there’s an international reaction to their policies and cruelties, and they now feel cornered.

The American economy is now riding in the back of a cybertruck, under the control of the madman we gave the wheel, heading toward a Thelma and Louise denouement. I fully expect that we will go over that cliff, taking a good chunk of the world with us.

There is, at present, a very thin line standing between democracy and fascism in America, and the next few weeks will determine whether that line is holding. I’m talking about the Law, the Courts and the the Universities.

The 5th Estate, the Press and the Media are barely functional, not even willing, for the most part (except comedians), to call out fascism by its real name (they use the academic term, ‘authoritarianism’ – it’s elite and vague and sounds less threatening).

Social Media has taken up the slack of what remains of democracy and free speech, performing the role that pamphleteering did between the first American Revolution and the Civil War. I find myself no longer getting my news and analysis directly from newspapers or television, and the marketplace of ideas is boundless and international. This is a completely different realm of media, with a whole new set of rules, evolving constantly, that govern behavior and trust.

The vessel of our freedom is still encapsulated in words and institutions inspired and put into action more than two centuries past. If these barriers are breached, we will be in a new state of civil war. At that point another line of defense comes into play. There’s the police, the national guard, the military, led by educated commanders who’ve taken pledges to defend the Constitution and the law. These are forces composed of people from communities most affected by the actions of this administration. We will be in unknown territory.

We are in a Squeeze.

America will survive. The world will survive. The relationships between us all will be radically altered. We will have been through a deep process of self examination. Perhaps for the first time since the last World War, since FDR and long after, we will be forced into revisioning our entire political and economic culture.

My generation won’t be around to witness the conclusion of that process. But we will have been privileged to see its beginning, and to have learned much on the ride along the way.

Where Are We?

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Where Are We?

By, Ralph E. Melcher

”It cannot be repeated too often: nothing is more fertile in marvels than the art of being free, but nothing is harder than freedom’s apprenticeship. The same is not true of despotism. Despotism often presents itself as the repairer of all the ills suffered, the support of just rights, defenders of the oppressed, and founder of order. People are lulled to sleep by the temporary prosperity it engenders, and when they do wake up, they are wretched. But Liberty is generally born in stormy weather, growing with difficulty amid civil discords, and only when it is already old does one see the blessings it has brought.”

  • Alexis de Tocqueville, ‘Democracy In America’

I spoke to my son the other day, about the current state of his world. I say his world because I’m old, and this world is barely mine anymore, while he’s not yet middle-aged. He’ll be dealing with the consequences of a world I’ll sooner than later leave behind. I said to him that I thought these times were the worst I’ve ever seen. But then I think, ‘Is this true?’ Has my memory of the pain and the rage my generation lived through merely faded? Perhaps it’s just a shock that so much we fought for is being once again challenged. Perhaps, I’m like my father, who rarely told us stories of his days fighting the last Great War. The stories he told were often laced with humor and self-effacing jest. Perhaps those times I lived through have been so thoroughly buried in satire and revision that they’re barely real in my memory anymore. But I know they were real, and the challenges we faced were no less perilous, although we had less perception at the time of the stakes and dangers we faced.

These times are a shadow of what it must have felt like to be in London during the Blitz in World War Two. Every evening of every day the bombs rained down, some of them intercepted, but a good many getting through. At any time, you might be the next to get hit, and the quality of life you’ve taken for granted could be ended. If you don’t get hit, the next day you have to face going forth to survey the damage. Everywhere is pain and fear, deliberately and with malice, inflicted by one set of human beings against another.

I’ve been reading an analysis of the American character, Democracy In America, written early in the 19th century by a Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville. Also, I’ve read accounts and biographies of the lives and struggles of the founders and leaders over these two and a half centuries of America’s existence. I’ve begun to realize that American democracy has always been a rather precarious proposition. It’s been challenged by this and that faction, and defended by those who are courageous and have been willing to stand up in its defense. My life, as was my father’s, was shaped by this battle. He fought against authoritarian dreamers who ruthlessly laid waste to a large part of the world. My cohorts and me, living under the constant threat of nuclear holocaust, stood up against morally corrupt administrations and our nation’s misguided imperialistic obsessions.

My son’s first encounter with political realities was the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. He was 10 years old at the time. Since then, he’s been witness to a succession of futile conflicts, begun with great hubris and ending in humiliation and defeat. While these wars were fought, our nation had to face its limitations and question its priorities. At the same time as new freedoms emerged out of our ongoing self-examination, restraints against the power of unlimited wealth were being set aside. Along with the emergence of new forms of media that connected people across every boundary of culture distance, a reaction born out of economic stagnation and the failures of religion began to grow. A succession of demagogues, mostly concerned with the accumulation of power and wealth and the promotion of ideologies, began to thrive upon the inchoate frustrations of the populace. Democracy, as defined in our Constitution, was relegated as an afterthought.

Now we find ourselves in danger once again. Just as in all the wars and civil conflicts of the past, the power of factions has risen to challenge the rights of those who won’t consent to the rule of the minority. We are once again asked to question our basic commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion which, after all, is at the foundation of our democracy, the core principle which actually defines it.

In my short lifetime I’ve watched dozens of our greatest leaders assassinated, along with many who raised their voices, murdered or suppressed, sometimes by criminals, sometimes by police. I’ve watched the cities burn, and I’ve seen blood in the streets. Many have fallen, standing up to those who would be king. During these dark days of ignorance and cowardice in the world of Trump, there are increasing signs of courage and commitment to the principles that have led and defined us. Every day, the actions of this administration and its sycophants feel like a deliberately inflicted gut-punch. Nevertheless, I see everywhere signs of new life in a population resisting the temptation to surrender to collective despair.

As a nation, having been overnight overcome by its worst tendencies, we’re now seen by many in the rest of the world as an adversary. We aren’t used to being seen as the bad guy, the neighborhood bully, the untrustworthy tyrant, no different from any in a long parade of fallen empires. We’re forced as a nation to awaken from our complacent sleep and become aware of a stark dissonance between our elevated self-image and our present actions as seen by others. At the same time, there are many in this world who carry for us the hope and faith that we will rise once again to our better nature and promise.

(If you are not convinced that we are in a war for democracy, then you may be asleep at the wheel. If there is any doubt, I recommend you look up ‘Foreign Affairs’ on your favorite podcast app, or listen here to an interview with Fiona Hill. It gives the most comprehensive view into the present state of the world that I’ve heard anywhere. You may remember Fiona Hill from when she gave the clearest and most devastating testimony as a witness during the Trump impeachment inquiry. She’s one of our most accomplished diplomats.)

February 22, 2025 at 6:09 AM

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We aren’t helpless. All of what’s against us is part of what Naomi Klein calls ‘The Shock Doctrine’, and others call ‘Flooding The Zone’. The object is to bombard people with a sense of constant crisis, so that we become numbed, disoriented, confused and discouraged, and ultimately we loose focus and give in to despair.

A counter to this is embracing a wider vision, one that no longer perceives the world as if our particular national perspective is the only lens available. The world is changing rapidly and far too quickly for anyone to exert enduring dominance and control. We are watching the diminishing of outmoded institutions like the nation state and moving gradually (and painfully) toward a different alignment of the global order. Rather than hurling bombs and nukes back and forth, the economic and political universe, under the pressures of climate change and new technologies is rapidly reorganizing itself.

Resistance to the domination of any religion, ideology, or so-called ‘superpower’ is arising everywhere. In every nation and in every person, all of the old boundaries and alliances are being daily challenged.

We don’t have to be overwhelmed. The whole world is rapidly being forced awake. We must become attuned and direct our attention toward helpful and healing efforts going on in the world. Human beings are endlessly creative. Although we often struggle to open our vision to new worlds and a new order, we’ve never failed to see our way through.

We are no longer isolated. No one is. The world is one interwoven economic organism. Like the Internet, a vast and excellent living protoplasm, woven in networks, designed to reorganize and reroute itself around anything that blocks its way, anything that wounds or damages. Designed to defy apocalypse and to survive.

It has started. We’ve been attacked from within. Blood will be shed. Blood must be shed. That’s the price…the sacrifice. It will be the young on the streets and the old in their homes. The center will not hold, because we all dwell in the periphery. A new center will arise in each of us. The center and the whole will be the same.

Welcome to the Revolution. Welcome to the World.

Direct Cinema

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‘Essential’, ‘Unforgettable’, ‘Body Horror Classic’, ‘Feminist Cult Classic’, ‘Dark Comedy’, are some of the quotes being thrown around about ‘The Substance’, a new film by Coralie Fargeat, starring Demi Moore. The best description I’ve seen is the line in the teaser from New York Magazine, “An enraged scream in cinematic form”. Having been released during the season of America’s self immolating election, ‘The Substance’ is a testament to society’s desire to go backwards into thin fantasy worlds created to protect us from looking at ourselves.

The film is relentless and brutal and without compromise. Many viewers may be repulsed, or even traumatized, although I question if anything on the screen matches the daily horror displayed on the evening news. The film juxtaposes the sleazy spectacle of Donald Trump style beauty pageants with explosions of rage that reminded me of the movie ‘Carrie’, as well as the tortured physical metaphors often portrayed in the films of David Cronenberg.

Blending horror and comedy in a surrealistic mix of ‘pumped up’ visual extremes we see in television commercials and popular magazines, ‘The Substance’ pushes up against cinema’s most powerful operatic limits. The intent is to forcibly shock the viewer awake. Its images are grotesque and direct, and anyone not altered in their presence is either unconscious or braindead.

In the face of extremes of hate and violence pushed by those who wish to rule and profit, the floodgates of truly political art have opened in the mainstream. Films like ‘Barbie’, ‘Women Talking’ and ‘Poor Things’ speak directly to the atrocities of female oppression. ‘The Substance’ is one of those, and it isn’t trying to be reasonable or gentle in a world where the spectacle of politics has taken us to the edges of absolute chaos.

During the drawn out, horrifying and over-the top final cataclysm in ‘The Substance’ there’s a close up shot of a terrified little girl covered in blood. She’s been dressed up to echo the exotic sexual fantasies paraded before her on the stage, and her face displays the full horror children witness everyday in a world trapped in its fantasies and dominated by its own irrational fears.

Women Talking

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In (2023) I managed to see most of the movies nominated for the Best Picture at the Academy Awards. (except ‘Elvis’ – I was never much into Elvis and am not particularly fond of biopics in general.)

That was the year ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ won the award.

Sarah Polley’s film ‘Women Talking’ was awarded ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’

I thought it deserved ‘Best Picture’ – at least.

When I saw it at the theater I wept tears from the beginning to the end. I just watched it again on Prime Video, and it had much the same effect, although I was able to draw back just a little bit and appreciate the pure technical perfection of the film. (It won the Movie Of The Year from the American Film Institute.)

No film in my memory has affected me so deeply. I’ve elevated it to my top three favorite films of all time. (It falls between ‘Wings Of Desire’ for its depth, ‘Drive’ for its technical perfection – ‘Women Talking’ has both, and the best acting ensemble I’ve ever witnessed). I haven’t seen a better movie before or since.

Coming into this election and all of the struggles it has brought to the surface, ‘Women Talking’ perfectly exposes the deepest and most universal issues at play in this nation and in the world.

October Surprise

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I sit in this cafe in Santa Fe drinking my coffee and reading about the approaching hurricane, billed as potentially ‘one of the most destructive hurricanes on record for West-Central Florida.’ I open the MAPS app on my phone and enter St. Petersburg, Florida, zeroing in on the strip of barrier island beaches along the Gulf of Mexico, until I find the section called Treasure Island. I scan the shoreline to see if there’s anything I might recognize from the time I lived there in 1972. Outside of the main road facing the hotels and resorts it’s hard to imagine that any trace remains of what I knew back then.

Most of Treasure Island at that time was made up of slightly run down motels and beach cottages inhabited by seasonal vacationers, boat people and retirees. In the middle of this were two structures that remained from a previous complex mostly washed away in a previous hurricane. Separated from neighbors by wide strips of beach sand they were inhabited by an odd population standing well apart from the surrounding social fauna. I shared one half of a duplex shack with a high school friend from Cleveland who’d attended college in St. Pete and had taken up with a community of boat builders and maintenance people centered in a nearby boat yard. I was just a year out of college, having dropped out after the Vietnam Draft Lottery missed my number. I’d spent months traveling by thumb all across the western states and through Canada back to the Great Lakes. After working briefly as a dishwasher in the local department store, I left my family in Cleveland, coming to Florida at my friend’s invitation.

A young couple lived on the other side of the duplex. A larger separate dwelling edged closer to the Gulf shore, headquarters for the president of a local motorcycle gang and his occasional guests and associates. ‘Pappy’ is what they called him. His gang, the Pagans, was apparently rather notorious in the region, having carved out territory in competition with a local chapter of the Hell’s Angels. We were young, college educated dropouts that had more in common with Volkswagens than motorcycles. It sounds rather scary, but it worked out quite well all around.

Whenever Pappy’s gang went on extended ‘runs’ to whatever piratical adventures they were engaged in, he asked us to watch over the house and property, and was grateful for our vigilance. When in residence he always treated us respectfully as his neighbors. We assumed his gang’s adventures involved some forms of drug running or other illegal activity, as he appeared to be rather prosperous, if out of place in the neighborhood. He possessed a very nice boat, cars and motorcycles, and had no discernible employment.

The complex appeared to be under regular surveillance by the local cops. Pappy often came out to greet them on their patrols carrying his small pet boa constrictor, the gang’s mascot, around his shoulders. There was often a steady parade of guests in and out of the residence, and when he and other gang members occasionally gathered to drink and party we learned it was wise for us to stay clear. In all other matters, as long haired hippies being also somewhat out of place in the middle of a community of white conservatives, the intimidating presence of Pappy was actually reassuring.

St. Petersburg at the time was divided into distinct social groups. There was the established population of mostly very conservative southern white people. They barely tolerated the presence of a growing insurgent population of young people that orbited various college campuses. A large, mostly segregated black population lived in tightly knit communities along unpaved streets in the semi-rural neighborhoods on the fringes of the city. They worked mostly in municipal service and maintanence jobs, tending the roads and the parks and collecting the trash. On the weekends they gathered in Baptist churches nestled in cozy subtropical tree lined lots.

There was a constant ebb and flow of vacation visitors, spending their money and luxuriating near the beaches or out fishing and sailing on boats and yachts in the Gulf or in the Tampa Bay. Then there were the vagabonds like us, mostly refugees that circulated among all of these groups, taking advantage of the climate and whatever marginal employment that was available.

When I moved south I brought with me a collection of books and articles documenting the decade of political activity that had moved me through high school and then as a college student between 1966 until 1972. Much had come to light in those years for the generation born just after the Second World War. We had been thrown into the first age of television and simultaneously educated through the benefits of the GI Bill and the rough awakening of the Civil Rights and Antiwar movements. The world in those years had been both disorienting and an opening to new possibilities and perspectives.

The so-called progressive environmental movements in those days emerged out of the shock and passions of the sixties toward something more organized and enduring. The seeds had been initially planted by pioneering books like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Scott and Helen Nearing’s Living The Good Life, Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s alarmist The Population Bomb and Stewart Brand’s compilation of alternative resources and philosophies, The Whole Earth Catalog, inspired by the first photographs of the global biosphere taken from space.

I used my time in Florida, while living on the beach, smoking marijuana, listening to music and drinking cheap liquor from the state stores, I reviewed all the currents and options effecting my life. It was sort of a suspended state between the stages of a life as I sought my own path forward in pursuit of a better world.

Sitting beneath the parachute canopy that blew gently in breezes from the Gulf, I watched the sun rise and set over the always restless waters and imagined new possibilities as alternatives to the industrial wilderness I’d grown up in. It seemed possible that humanity would awaken from its nightmare of wasteful conflict and pursue collective survival and the chance for contentment.

I look at the present map of those beaches on my iPhone and see that the roads have all been closed to traffic as the communities have mostly been evacuated. The expected storm surge is predicted to be as high as 15 feet. There have been over 40 tornado warnings so far across the state of Florida, and at least one large tornado has already devastated parts of Fort Myers, south of St. Petersburg, then cut across the Interstate 75. Millions of people are fleeing on roads away from the Gulf and most of the gas stations are out of gas. This has been called a ‘once in a century’ storm, but it follows by barely a week the previous ‘once in a century’ storm. Milton follows Helene, with two more months of hurricane season to go.

When I left Florida I moved to the West with the thought of devoting my life to pursuing possible alternatives in a world drowning in waste and ignorance. Having grasped and accepted a new understanding of history and what we are responsible for, I found it impossible to turn away. Since those times, for more than 60 years, many of us struggled and hoped and achieved a greater clarity of our options. We went from dreaming to innovating. We constructed new technologies to harness our visions. At the same time we watched as the fear of change grew into the fierce backlash of denial that now threatens to throw us backward into the destructive cycles of the past.

I remember the innocent days when the most extreme harshness of the backlash kept us out of bars along the beach because our hair was too long. We were young and arrogant and resilient and we flaunted our sense of pride and indifference. The petty prejudice we encountered we saw as a relic of the past. If at times we felt like strangers in a strange land, we mostly shrugged it off as we faced the future with what we thought was a clear sense of its possibilities.

I remember sailing free over the clear waters that could be both gentle and sometimes overwhelming in its sense of awesome scope and majesty. I remember the fear inspired by lightening and thunder over the distant waves in the night, and the warm currents that caressed my body as I floated beyond the breakers beneath an endless sky. The world moves in crazy currents, just like the wind and the oceans, and we are only human. We navigate the waves and sometimes get caught in the backwash and sometimes we get swept away.

We were so young, and we thought we could reshape the world, just because we believed we could. We threw ourselves on the currents and trusted them to take us to where we needed to be. Hippies, motorcycle gangs, college students, even Christians and communists, believed we could push the whole world toward the good as we released our imaginations and accomplished miracles. But we forgot in our pride that advancing our vision required that we leave no one behind.

I now look at the map and see images of the storm’s advance, I know that the world I remember will be changed beyond recognition, and feel some pity for those forced to flee the wrath of the waters and the wind.

I no longer live near the sea. Where I live these desert heights often seem like a calm island floating above rough weather and the waves upsetting the rest of the world. Looking at my screens with their views of the storm, amid the world’s violence, ignorance and misery, my heart sometimes threatens to turn to stone. I know that, unlike the ocean, stone eventually gets worn away and vanishes to nothing. Once totally open and filled with hope, now I often feel almost empty and ready to blow away in the wind.

Neither time nor history flows backward. The tides and cycles repeat, the days and years pass through darkness and light. Whenever we grow complacent we’re jolted awake. The world and human civilization has passed through many fevers. We’ve survived cataclysms, ice ages, plagues and world wars. Through each cycle the lessons have become more obvious and the stakes have become greater. We learn again and again the lesson that we all share the same small planet and the borders between us are mostly illusions.

Civil Wars

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I just finished the remarkable new book by Nancy Pelosi, The Art Of Power. It was on the one hand an inspiring first hand account of indomitable courage and determination in the face of difficult odds and a history of the major political struggles I’ve witnessed since 1987. On the other hand it’s an account of a time of civility in politics and government that has frayed and all but collapsed since the rise of Trump.

I feel both pessimistic and useless in the face of what’s coming. I now find myself reading books about the lead up to wars; Eric Larson’s The Demon of Unrest, about the five months preceding the first American Civil War, and The Proud Tower, by Barbara’s Tuchman, about Europe and America before World War One. Each marked the necessary transition from one state of civilization to the next. I find that reading history helps me out of a state of helpless depression, perhaps it helps me to accept that what’s likely to happen has happened before.

Yesterday I saw Coppola’s new and perhaps final film, Megalopolis, which is a rather surrealistic fable depicting the conflict between creativity and stagnation in a world of decadence and decline. It ends in a rather fanciful and/or hopeful conclusion, where creativity and progress apparently triumphs over our clinging to the past.

I was reminded of the film that has had a strong impact on me this year. Civil War depicts in realistic and down to earth terms a likely scenario should the USA descend once again into bloody conflict. In interviews, both the director and the actress Kirsten Dunst refer to Lee Miller, upon which her character is based, and the subject of the newly released Kate Winslet film, Lee She was a World War Two photographer who bore witness to some of the worst atrocities of that conflict.

I’ve come to believe that the likelihood of an election without violence and a peaceful transition of power is unlikely, no matter who wins, and the only thing you or I can do to alter events is to choose not to participate in the violence in word or deed. We must refuse to spread the hatred and fear being directed by so-called leaders, against the poor, the weak and the ‘others’ in order to advance a bid for supremacy and power. We must recognize the seeds of fascism that are being encouraged everyday, and deny them from taking root within us.

I’ll be driving up to Denver to take a flight to Cleveland to visit family on October 24th and will return to Santa Fe the day before the election. I wonder whether this trip will mark a rise or fall of the world we’ve known. Right now I’m not betting either way.

DNC Night Three

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Last night felt to me like a religious ritual and a call to final battle. Watching an aged Bill Clinton was to me like listening to the incantation of a high priest who, more than anyone, represented for me the political aspirations of my generation. Through all of the struggles with Newt Gingrich and all the scandals and persecutions I remember Clinton saying that his only real enemy was the Christian Right. In this we are the same.

I’ve watched the darkness in the soul of America growing ever since I was a teenager, and it’s always been the same darkness, based in the foul stench of religious intolerance. For me, having been a dedicated Christian in my youth, this has always felt like the deepest form of betrayal. With The Party Of Trump it’s reached its ultimate embodiment. To contemplate its victory is to consider the collapse of everything in this world I believe worthwhile.

I was ready to give up. Whatever this is, it is reviving my spirit. Like Bill Clinton, I’ve grown old and I’m dying and this feels to me like my final battle. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

I just finished a science fiction novel called ‘The Player Of Games’ by Iain M. Banks. It depicts an encounter between an enlightened culture and a decadent empire that’s based on war and domination. After last night I woke up at 2:00 in the morning and was compelled to finish the book, in which an existential clash between civilizations is resolved through the playing of an intricate game from which only one culture emerges intact.

I don’t believe in coincidences. The stakes of the game we are in are way beyond the usual politics. As Buttigieg put it, we are facing the ‘politics of darkness’. This is a religious war, and this convention is nothing less than an act of exorcism.

Whatever the outcome, I don’t expect to live through another administration. I’ve pretty much lost my voice and my health is fading, so I’ve become almost useless in this fight. All that remains is my attention and whatever rituals I can maintain to keep me sane. My whole life has been wrapped up in this war, and I know that no wars are final, but I’m resolved to keep in the game until the end.

“Shut Up and Get Back To Work”

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I could only be somewhat amused at U. S. House Speaker Mike Johnson’s performance addressing students and the press at Columbia University, telling them to stop their nonsense and get back to classes. Behind him stood a grinning Elise Stefanik, joining in the act, both performing for stock footage to be used in the upcoming fall campaigns.

It struck me that a major lesson to be taken in a week of escalating campus demonstrations across the world, was the apparent inability of generations in power to learn from history or to avoid repeating the same tactical errors again and again.

For me the events are somewhat nostalgic.

I recall an evening in 1970 when a large part of the student body at Case Western Reserve University gathered in the student union cafeteria to debate a response to the newly launched expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia. The meeting was part of an escalation of activity centered that had been building on campuses for many months after events at New York’s Columbia University in March and April of 1968. Partly In response to the war and touched off by resistance to plans for the university to build a segregated gym on the fringes of Harlem, students and ‘outside agitators’ occupied buildings, debated one another, conducted ‘teach-in’ activities and generally obstructed normal college business. Eventually Columbia administrators called in the NYPD, who proceeded to brutally attack the demonstrators, injuring many and arresting over 700 participants. The consequence was an expansion of actions in solidarity driven by organized coordination on campuses all across the country. (Governor Abbot and DeSantis take note)

Listening to the rising militancy of rhetoric in that student union meeting it became obvious to my friend Robert and I that impending action was in he works, and Impatient with all of the talking we headed over to the ROTC building which had emerged as the likely target. Being the first to arrive at the location we took positions seated on both sides of the steps leading to the front doors. Just then a closeted group of middle aged men in suits looking somewhat bewildered and uncertain, apparently summoned from their evening cocktails, approached from across the plaza. Foremost in the group was the University president. He cautiously approached the two of us sitting like quiet Buddha’s on the steps and asked who we were. In a moment of smart ass mutual inspiration we both replied that we were ‘gargoyles’. The president gazed at us blankly for a moment, then turned back to the little group, leading them away into the night. A moment later the large group of students arrived from the irmeeting, marched up to the front door and proceeded to occupy the building for the next few days.

The student movement in those days was responding to an unpopular war and a rising awareness of racial injustice, but it was more than that. We were addressing fundamental questions about the relevance and responsibilities of our educational institutions in addressing inequities in the larger world. In virtually every classroom deep questions were being asked challenging the growing dissonance in times of accelerating change, between what and how we were being taught, and how it related to the outside world. The challenges were made using every conceivable form, from classroom debate to teach-ins and street theater, to poetry and artwork, to obstruction of business as usual. Outside of campus social activism began to explode in the streets. Inmates were taking over the asylums. Before the tide had receded and things returned to a new normal, many changes were made, and in spite of the forces of reaction the social movements of those decades laid foundations for the movements and counter movements we are seeing today.

Societies thrive and advance to the degree that they respond to ever new realities of the present. Intelligent leaders and pioneers must be encouraged to think and to continually question the status quo. Universities are designed to be laboratories for discourse and discussion. Students are ideally trained to be more than receptacles for predigested opinions and established ideologies. The young see the world with fresh eyes that are less tolerant of dogma and hypocrisy, and more willing to take risks and learn from their mistakes. Inexperience and ignorance are to be overcome, but they are not a crime.

When faced with the spectacle of injustice the young are more outspoken and generally feel they have less to loose. Back in the day, when president Richard Nixon held up the ‘silent majority’ of middle America as his standard for patriotism, angry college students were portrayed as irresponsible and out of touch, or else as naive victims of shadowy bands of outside agitators and ‘far left’ college elites. It appears that nothing much has changed in the rhetoric of reaction since those times.

The Mike Johnsons and Elise Stefaniks will always find hooks and divisions upon which to hang their campaigns based on fear and self righteousness. In the sixties the paranoid establishment along with the media exploited tactical squabbles between black and white protestors in order to divide them and pacify dissent. Today the tactic is to label any objections to Israeli military excess and apartheid policies as ‘antisemitic’, even while campus protestors include Jews, Muslims, Christians and people simply appalled at the horrific images seen everyday in the media. In some cases the diversity of participants’ backgrounds and opinions have led to heated disagreement and sharp debate. Irresponsible actors on all sides have at times resorted to harassment and even occasional violence. Some students and teachers have felt alienated and fearful. Never missing an opportunity to fan the passions of a moment, politicians and instigators portray every unfortunate incident as the norm. In fact, the preponderance of violence in nearly every instance has been perpetrated by the forces of law and order.

The gap in life experience between generations raised in the last half of the 20th century and those now coming of age in the 21st is almost unbridgeable. The decades that followed the last World War were characterized by an almost constant state of expansion and innovation. America stood at the center of a global project to build the new world order. Whatever flaws existed in America’s self image were covered over by almost continual economic growth and innovation, low unemployment, low inflation, huge stock dividends and an overlay of conspicuous consumption.

The new century brought an unrelenting succession of national traumas. It began with the dot-com crash and recession in 2001, closely followed by the attack on the World Trade Center. Then followed two decades of war in the Middle East and Afghanistan, a housing crash and the Great Recession of 2007-2009. After brief respite of hope and civility in the Obama years came the daily nightmare of the most ethically challenged presidency in United States history. All of this was interrupted by the worldwide COVID pandemic along with the rapid proliferation of disastrous consequences in the wake of climate change. Finally the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the war in Israel have brought about the most destabilizing global situations since the Cold War.

My generation was the first raised on television and under the threat of nuclear holocaust. Almost from birth we were exposed to images of war and mayhem in foreign lands running counter to the idealization of America’s self-image. The moral pontification propagated in our churches and schools and in the mainstream media became increasingly detached from the reality of people’s lives. We were told that all of the ‘bad’ people and situations were somewhere else. By the time we arrived at college our view of American exceptionalism had changed dramatically from that of our parents. They’d suffered through the horrors and triumphs of a World War, in which the very foundations of democracy had been nearly defeated by the forces of totalitarianism. We were summoned instead to serve and support a futile war against a small foreign nation while watching on our daily screens our cities catching fire, our most admired leaders being assassinated, and our sons and brothers killed in the jungles and brutalized on the streets. We questioned, and then we rebelled.

Not only is the current cohort of college age students much more diverse than it was in the sixties, it’s a generation that’s experienced first hand the cracks in the foundations of the American dream widening almost beyond repair. Our established institutions appear to languish in denial. Justice has been challenged and has failed repeatedly. The truth is continually subverted by lies and fantasies. Freedoms that have been won through centuries of struggle are being discarded while the very survival of civilization is threatened by changes in the weather. Our political institutions appear inadequate or unwilling to address these situations in any meaningful way.

The campus movements of the sixties culminated in the execution of four students by the Ohio National Guard in May of 1970. Although this event didn’t stop the inevitable momentum toward change, it made us take a hard look at the consequences of poking the beast head-on. These days, when I hear the rhetoric of people like Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton and the words and actions of leaders like Greg Abbot and Ron DeSantis I wonder whether their ultimate goal is to provoke violence and fear in order to justify the suppression of all alternative points of view. Are they pushing for another Kent State massacre? Do they imagine that this strategy will work any better than it ever has? I guess if your ‘go to’ strategy is _God, Guns and Trump,_ there isn’t much of an alternaive.

I question whether these purveyors of fantasies of the past can presume to know, evaluate, or judge the motives of young people, whose entire living experience has born witness to the breakdown of those very illusions?

These students are the future, and the future will not be denied. Like we who grew up in the fifties and sixties, they see much more clearly how the world has changed than their parents who cling to the status quo. Ultimately, the young will prevail because they must. Like every human generation they have to grapple with the world as it is, and not as we wish it to be.

The catalyst for the current uprising on campuses is a costly war between nations and peoples who’ve made a long series of unfortunate political and strategic decisions that have lead into a death spiral of almost imprenetable anguish. Both sides in this war have dehumanized their opponents in order to justify horrific violence and the daily spectacle of unchecked slaughter. Both sides are committing violence against the rest of humanity, as the constant stream of images are in fact its extension. In such an ongoing ‘all or nothing’ conflict neither side will achieve the final resolution it desires, while each player appears willing to pull the entire world into the struggle.

Perhaps we can understand motivations on both sides of the war. Both see this as an existential struggle deeply rooted in generations of displacenent, appropriation and vengeance. But more than understanding is required to bring about a pause in the conflict. Concerned nations need to intercede forcefully to bring the violence to a halt. The Land of Palestine has long been a regional proxy for the very powers that both persecuted Jews and colonized the people of the Middle East and Africa, and for the forces that have risen in resistance to empire. All nations in the region and beyond share responsibility for the repercussions. America, as Israel’s ‘unconditional’ ally, has the biggest role to play.

Until the violence stops the protests will not stop, and attacking the institutions of higher education, firing college presidents or advocating military or police interference will most likely backfire. If conservatives have their way this internal conflict could escalate, and increasingly authoritarian measures could fuel even more destructive cycles of resistance and repression. History repeats, but it never goes backwards. The young, who grow frustrated with the refusal of governments to deal realistically with their concerns, will eventually inherit the earth and all of the powers that play upon it.

It was the eve of my 20th birthday. After the occupation we wandered back to the campus radio station, where Robert conducted a late night show playing eclectic music and recordings and where we had access to the Associated Press teletype and got the latest news of the day as it was being generated.

That evening a brand new album by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young had just arrived, and we ended up playing the first song.’Carry On’ repeatedly, all through the night.

Rejoice, rejoice, we have no choice

But to carry on..