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.
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.
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.
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.
In the afternoons, following a day grappling with my high school insecurities, I’d stroll down the street from school to visit my friend Bill Halas at his home. Sometimes I’d bike over there in the evenings. Bill’s mother accepted me as an addition to a household that once included a husband and five older siblings. She and Bill, the latecomer, were both avid cooks and gardeners and active readers, sharing sophisticated tastes in music and art. Bill’s father passed away when he was very young, and when I met him his older siblings had long departed the household. Having an extraordinarily precocious and active mind his life had taken a rather solitary trajectory, his mother being the most reliable companion and sometimes his intellectual adversary. My own teenaged life was made unusual by the experience of being recruited for a special government program that took poor kids with high IQ’s out of their normal milieu and sent them to spend the summer living on college campuses. Our friendship flourished. Together we navigated the complexities of a rapidly changing world in the late 60’s, our bond growing from a shared sense of alienation and a drive for mutual discovery.
We met amidst a shifting cultural landscape with war, race riots, and assassinations unfolding in real time on our television screens. Popular culture was shifting radically from the segregated milieu of radio and the movies. Grasping for alternatives, we immersed ourselves in diverse music genres, from jazz to classical to experimental, and engaged in earnest discussions on philosophy and politics. We wandered the city smoking cigarettes rolled with pipe tobacco. We agreed and disagreed on everything. Sometimes we took his mother’s little Honda on road trips across the northern Ohio countryside, making up poetry inspired by highway signs (‘Pass With Care’).
I was the idealist and Bill was the purist, who took everything down to its roots. When I first met him he was experimenting with hydroponics. When he became interested in weaving he built his own loom and wove his own cloth and made his own hats. When he took up photography he began by studying its history, then building his own pinhole camera. Finally, he took up his brother’s old Nikon and developed the photos in his dad’s basement darkroom. My own nature was less grounded, tending toward the pursuit of imaginative utopian speculation and obscure strains of idealistic thinking. I felt compelled to understand the whole of everything, and very path I took led me down side roads, making it difficult to pursue a single course or become a model student.
Bill’s political awareness was way ahead of my own. He travelled to Chicago with his brother in 1968 to demonstrate at the Democratic convention and brought back photos and first hand accounts from the fringes of the police riot that we’d all watched on television. Later in our high school career we conspired with like minded friends to create an alternative journal that we mimeographed at the local anti-war office. We passed out leaflets and marched in circles chanting slogans in downtown Cleveland and attended meetings of a small radical organization led by a retired teacher and veteran of the Lincoln Brigade who fought in the Spanish Civil War.
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Our friendship endured beyond high school as we pursued separate paths in college, delving into alternative communities and exploring the back-to-the-land movement. Bill’s quest for self-sufficiency and my search for spiritual revelation led us on distinct journeys. During those years in the early seventies everything everywhere was in flux and was being questioned, and for both of us the quest took us out of the proscribed path of college and career.
After we’d both left school we got together for a road trip east, tracking down old classmates and exploring alternative possibilities. We proceeded to Boston, where we met a friend of Bill on a sidewalk near Harvard Square. A large expansive figure closely resembling the British actor Peter Ustinov (with a beard), he sold carnations on the street, playing a concertina and disarming prospective customers with a performance that came right out of magical fairytales. We spent that evening at his lodgings in the attic of an unheated and condemned three story house in Roxbury. The next morning we crawled out of our sleeping bags to get breakfast at a nearby cafe. Our appetite for squalor satiated, we made our way out of the city and headed back to the Midwest.
Eventually, after making a long pilgrimage to the West I moved to Denver. Occasionally, while visiting my family back east I’d get together with Bill and he’d demonstrate for me whatever new endeavor had absorbed his interest. Over time these became increasingly esoteric even for my taste, involving dowsing and ley lines evidence for antedeluvian alien carvings left behind in rocks and boulders. He poured over old maps illustrating the mysterious energetic pathways determining the placing of streets and structures in small towns all over Ohio.
Our contacts dwindled over the years, and the last I heard from Bill was through letters filled with further interpretations of ancient artifacts and faces found in the rocks. I’d heard he was in contact with the Edgar Cayce people in Virginia and intended to build his own private settlement on a plot of land that his brother owned in Vermont. After at a year of hearing nothing I found out from his mother that he’d fallen out of communication with everyone. In a last message to his older brother, Bill had mentioned spotting a brown bear on the plot of land. After months of trying to track down his whereabouts the family concluded that he’d disappeared without a trace. For the sake of closure they accepted that he’d probably been eaten by the bear.
I don’t know what really happened to Bill Halas. All I’m sure of is that
All I know is that we shared a moment in time, embarking on uncompromising journeys, determined to face the mysteries of the world, whether in the rocks, the forest, or the primal currents beneath.”
I just imbibed two healthy pints of Scotch Ale, a small handful of psychedelic mushrooms and a chunk of potent marijuana brownie…while printing 32 greeting cards so that I can replenish my rack at the grocery store and contribute to my gasoline fund for future trips into the present.
I’m hoping that some combination of the above will somehow blast me out of a sense of helplessness in the face of all the craziness and suffering, although I know it’s not really my responsibility and that I’ve done my part to advance this whole contraption…
I’ve been watching VICE NEWS documentaries looking into the darkest corners of the world, watching ‘Severance’ and ‘The Man Who Fell To Earth’, reading a Jonathan Franzen novel about a Christian youth group and reliving so many moments in the deep past in order to write about them, and writing about them, and wondering if this voluntary isolation from all the world matters anything at all.
Listen to the sound of tree limbs clashing deep in the primeval forest. ‘Klick!’ – It’s Doctor Strange on the offense, striving – ‘Klack!’ – to drive off the nefarious mystical spell castings of Baron von Mordo. My brother and me among the giant virgin pines in a Pennsylvania forest in 1963, acting out our favorite comic book fantasies as our parents set up our overnight camp. In those days we played at adventure and wandered magical worlds that are always open to imaginative travelers and children. Our family roamed the highways from Cleveland and the Midwest, circling the Great Lakes into Canada and driving south to Florida and east to Maine and the coast and along Appalachian ridges. We stopped at ocean beaches, floated in ‘glass bottom boats’ among the Everglades, gazed across rural landscapes from high mountain perches, peered up at the tall canyons of Manhattan and took in the futuristic wonders of the New York World’s Fair in 1965.
Growing up in the shadow of World War, I remember military aircraft flying in formation over the neighborhood when I was very young. Every Sunday we drove past an enormous parking lot filled with surplus tanks parked in the General Motors lot on our way to church. The weeks were punctuated by air raid sirens and school was interrupted by ‘duck and cover’ drills designed to stimulate the vivid nightmares of those of us who could contemplate the final fate of humankind.
An older boy who lived down the block kept pigeons in a coop on his upstairs back porch. The pigeons would circle over our houses every day. We kept a turtle in the back yard that our grandparents brought back from the road on one of their exotic yearly trips to California. This was before the Interstates were built, and the turtles were found crossing the two lane highways that made America interesting. In the winter the turtle would dig a hole in its little enclosure in which to hibernate. Every spring we anxiously awaited the resurfacing, coaxing the displaced beast with offerings of earthworms. Sometimes the turtle wouldn’t appear and that year our grandparents would bring us another.
My mother told me stories late in life about my very early childhood as an infant caught in the midst of a rivalry for attention between her and my grandmother, her mother-in-law. I carry almost no conscious recollections from those very early days when my parents shared a house with my grandparents. I have one dim memory of being pushed in a baby carriage by a very nice young woman who was my babysitter. She died of leukemia when still a teenager. Perhaps this was my first taste of grief. It could be that my mother only told me these stories in dreams. Maybe I’ve mixed up her stories with those of other relatives who are long gone.
The house I remember growing up in was located in an older part of town across the street from my great grandmother’s large corner dwelling. I spent hours upstairs in her kitchen, drinking coffee tempered with evaporated milk, listening to her tales of coming to America from the old country with her brothers early in the century. They opened a butcher shop in the neighborhood, when that part of the city was still mostly rural, the streets mostly dirt, yet to be covered in red bricks and later with asphalt when I was a teenager. There was still a butcher shop on the corner downstairs in the front of the large house, run by another family at the time. The large back yard was full of fruit trees and flower beds that my family would help her maintain. Just outside of the second story kitchen windows was a cherry tree that became the centerpiece of every summer when we climbed and picked the ripe and sour cherries. My younger brother fell from it one year and broke his leg, spending the remainder of that summer as an invalid perched in a bed that was set in our narrow downstairs dining room.
When I’ve gone back recently to visit the old neighborhood our old house still stands, in the very center of the block, slightly raised above the neighbors, and incredibly small. It’s hard to believe that four kids and two adults occupied that space for so many years, while my mother dreamed of the suburbs and argued with my father, who always hesitated, not one to take chances risks. Only after I had moved on into my independent life and my father died of lung cancer did my mother finally make the move that she dreamed of.
An Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser careens through the night along the rural roads of northern Ohio carrying three boys, almost men, probably stoned or drunk on something, composing poems out of the romantic words on road signs; “Pass With Care”, “Soft Shoulders”, “Narrow Curves.” The car was borrowed from someone’s parents. With the windows wide open and the moist breezes of northern forests wafting over us, we exulted in our futures and the promising scents of freedom and all things that grow.
I left home with a cloth sleeping bag slung by a rope over my shoulders, on my back my uncle’s old Korean War rucksack, the ‘Whole Earth Catalog’ and an ‘Oxford Annotated Bible’ from my college years, a change of clothes and a few sandwiches and provisions stuffed inside. I’d spent three and a half years at a prestigious institution (Case Western Reserve University), learning much and experiencing much during years of upheaval (1968-1972) and finally left after my number came up late in the lottery for the draft. The experiences I had were mostly outside of classes that were interesting but appeared rather irrelevant at the time.
I said farewell to my mother (my father was at work) and walked down to the embankment alongside the brand new interstate. (As a teenager I’d watched it tear through my neighborhood several years before. We’d watched the bulldozers turn my best friend’s house into a pile of broken pieces, set fires to excavated piles of discarded brush, fought snow battles in abandoned dwellings, stalked and vandalized the huge road builders in the middle of the night.) I put out my thumb and was subsequently propelled across the whole wide land, to Colorado and California and up the West Coast through to Oregon and Washington to Canada, across the Rockies and the great wide flat northern plains and along the pebble beaches of Lake Michigan and back toward Cleveland. (My dad drove out from Cleveland to meet me and we had a glass of wine together in Ann Arbor. Between that meeting and my later departure toward the beaches of Florida I felt our connection deepen as we had grown beyond our frequent ideological conflicts over the war and he had come to acknowledge me as an adult.) I was young during my travels and learned very little, but I took it all in with a feeling of constant awe, collecting inside of me a map of memories, of North America and so many of the people that drift within it.
After all of these travels and all of these adventures, where have I arrived? Who and what am I exactly? Where do I live in relation to the boundaries between order and chaos? Am I descended from the sweet young boy that I see in an old picture feeding the gentle deer at a petting zoo? Am I the instigator of plots to vandalize the enormous machines that cut their way through my neighborhood to build the Interstate? Am I the respectful Zen practitioner bowing before his teacher, or the smartass student telling the President of the University approaching a student occupied ROTC building that I was a ‘gargoyle’ guarding the doors? Do I prefer to wander along the edges of civilization where artists and pirates, nomads, shamans and assassins are created?
I passionately defend what I believe in but hold all beliefs lightly. I welcome the challenge of argument. I’ve always been a terrible student, unable to stick with a specific teacher or any specialized program for very long. My mind is both expansive and contrarian, drawn to whatever knowledge threatens to challenge the prevailing view. Learning for me is a labor to fit what is novel into the larger pattern of what is known. Having found an accommodation between them my intellect has to move on. I’m open to all possibilities and apply equal amounts of skepticism and belief to anything that opens the doors to new encounters. I absolutely won’t tolerate the tunnel vision that substitutes repetitive memes of ideology for actual thinking and I avoid such as I would a reeking mound of decaying garbage.
I’ve been called ‘narcissistic.’ Perhaps anyone who parades their thoughts in public is a bit narcissistic, presuming to believe that anyone else would be interested in them. In a world of so much diversity and argument one has to be a bit narcissistic in order to call attention to oneself.
I’ve also been accused of being terribly judgmental and even intolerant. I believe that the good of the whole transcends the good of the few, but that the few have the absolute right to speak and I have the absolute right not to listen. I can’t decide for others the difference between right and wrong, true and false, sense and nonsense, but I reserve the right to exclude from my presence those who insist on unquestionable absolutes.
Also true is that I possess an undercurrent of terrible anger, passed down to me through generations of injustice, unkindness and the undercurrents of loving abuse. My primary struggle in this life is against being governed by the rage, instead using it as a barometer that fuels a kind of hypersensitivity and compulsion to expose the undercurrents of lies and tension encountered in the environment around me. This has lead to the most profound progress and the deepest damages in my life. It’s a catalyst that moves me from states of stasis to states of movement and change. For those around me and the collectives and organizations in which I participate it uncovers the cauldron, and my passion provides some of the fire and the heat.
My most influential teachers have been the cities I’ve lived in. Cleveland taught me that I could swim against the strongest tides of family, of religious and societal expectations, of powerful and destructive establishments, of accepted reality itself. In Cleveland I first walked through the doors of perception to glimpse the hidden schematics of the brain and its relation to the universe. Denver taught me about the irrefutable strength of collective will and how it can be activated, directed and abused by effective and charismatic voices. In Denver I learned about the secrets of leadership and it’s ability to channel the collective will. Since coming to Santa Fe I’ve learned to approach the world with a larger degree of skepticism and to examine every belief carefully before confusing it with ‘truth’.
In Santa Fe I’ve lived for 35 years, longer than anywhere else. Here all the previous lessons and teachings have coalesced, as I’ve been brought repeatedly face to face with myself and my shadows. Through two marriages, the raising of a child, my interaction with organizational structures both large and small, and in my most recent confrontations with cancer, disunity and extended solitude, I’ve come to view myself more clearly in all of my urgent creative and destructive glory. In the process I’ve gained and lost friends, loved and tormented myself and others, tasted the mechanics and powers of leadership and the dynamics of failure, and come to understand and accept the role I’m here to play.
Through all of this I’ve learned the deepest lesson of real magic; that it’s primary fuel is the human will. How, like the mysterious force of gravity it can bend and reshape the contours of the universe in strange and subtle ways. I’ve arrived after all these years at the boundaries of a world of perception that my comic book hero would find familiar.
Klick! Klack!>
In these days there’s a growing atmosphere that breeds bad mojo – bad magic born out of magical thinking, along with an army of con artists who thrive on fear and fantasy. It feels increasingly like the universe of Doctor Strange, where delusions and demonic forces constantly seek to break through and disrupt all sense of order, enslaving the populace to chaotic forces by encouraging their worst tendencies. In the process those whose greed for power compels them to pull the strings strive to gather more influence to themselves, using the maze of politics to entrap our best collective intentions.
I’ve long observed that the rules of our politics are almost identical to those of magic, both being forms of a somewhat occult practice of weaving spells of language intended to influence and manipulate perception and reality. The tools and technologies are the same, revolving around the language of signs and symbols, fueled by elements of human desire, collective will and the necessity of belief. Neither practice is inherently good or evil, although both magic and politics are concerned with an accumulation of power, and there are inherent dangers in such pursuit. The division between our intentions toward compassionate and self serving ends can become very cloudy when certain rules and cautions aren’t respected.
When battling demons or conjuring new possibilities it’s important to remember that no matter what we do or what we intend, the rule is that any consequences, intended or not, will inevitably come back to us. (This is the rule of karma.) It’s also important to realize that those around us, even our ‘enemies’, are mirrors, and we must strive to show them the same compassion we have for ourselves. It’s most important when exercising power to stay awake, to remember where we are and what is our intention. Aside from these three, all other rules are subject to change at any time and it’s a wild and utterly changeable reality out there.
Ultimately the barriers to our imagination and our creativity will continue to be thrown open. The more they open the faster we must collectively adapt to the changes entailed by new technologies and new ways of thinking and perceiving. I’m optimistic that we will ultimately succeed and survive, only because we always have up to this point.
Meanwhile we drift, moving across worlds of fantasy through the outer space of our imaginations, with David Bowie’s song ‘Life On Mars’ rising behind us, the cold star-flecked blue screen backgrounds making us feel contained within a dark velvet sparkling blanket of the infinite. We travel through imaginary light-years, our sense of security wrapped and belted within capsuled contraptions, religions, ideologies and conspiracy theories, breathing through failing apparatus, imagining new colors and new planets in the dark. At this point we require more than a destination. We need redemption and forgiveness for one another. I know there’s better light far ahead, but I don’t know what remains to be seen. When truth has been abandoned to illusion its anyone’s guess what will survive when daylight comes.
Evolution never passes at a familiarly comfortable rate. The entire world can leap forward in an instant, or else changes take decades and centuries longer than human memory can track. If my great grandmother, who told me stories over the kitchen table, were transported to the present a good part of her sensory apparatus would no doubt go into shock, able only to process small quantities of totally unfamiliar data at a time.
Evolution doesn’t stop for us or for any other part of this ever changing universe, or for anything on this infinitesimal pebble we call the earth. Energy becomes matter, matter becomes atoms and atoms molecules. Molecules evolve to become the elements and elements combine to become life. Life goes through billions of years of creation and extinction, followed by resurrection, and so it goes, over and again. Evolution in matter becomes evolution in biology, plants and creatures emerge out of the earth and perish in amazing spectacles of life, struggling through extremes of hot and cold and countless changes.
Various proposals have been made for the start date of a geological epoch called the Anthropocene, which marks the significant impact of human culture on geologic ecosystems. Some proposals date this as far back as 12 – 16,000 years and the birth of agriculture, and others to the rise of the industrial revolution in the last century. I believe both of these views to be extremely short sighted.
About six million years ago, at the end of the Miocene, heading toward the ice ages, appear the hominins, our most ancient biological tribe, largely defined by the length of our legs being greater than that of our arms as we began to walk upright. While the biosphere was coming to resemble what exists today our ancestors struggled to come to terms with their expanding brains until, age after age, we arrived in our present form of homo sapien around 315,000 years ago, and evolution at long last crossed a critical threshold. While biological evolution proceeded in obscure niches and mostly through extinction, life entered a new phase, one that can no longer be adequately comprehended outside of the mental space of the self-reflective human mind.
Human beings have taken evolution in a new direction, possibly beginning with the emergence of the first tribes and the creation of the first cultural artifacts. When we began to shape the objects around us to reflect the images that appeared in our minds, we moved beyond the instinctive collectivity of the insect colony, the herd and the protective hunting community and began to consciously and deliberately reshape the world around us in our own image. Human evolution can’t be understood in strictly biological terms, for it occurs within the complex interface between the self-conscious individual and the ever changing forms of the collective. Humans are artisans of culture.
What’s become evident in our time is the pervasive effect of our evolutionary process on the atmospheric and geologic environment that surrounds us. It’s becoming obvious that human culture is now the dominant influence in the ecosphere, as our collective decision making largely determines what will perish and what will survive on our world. We are the caretakers and the destroyers. The dialogue between the individual and the collective has come to fully govern the dialogue between human civilization and the natural world. In the end, nature itself becomes, in effect, a human artifact.
Evolution is generally depicted in visual models as a vertical structure, where simplicity advances through complexity, leading to ‘higher’ developments along a continuum of molecules, organisms, species, etc. The focus of evolutionary theory in biology is on the structure and development viewed through the lens of individual organisms or species. Human evolution is no longer determined by individual divergence and biological mutation, but by collective structures and behaviors in which the uniqueness of the individual can’t be separated from the circumstances and influences of the social construct of which they are a part. The visual depiction of this structure could be more appropriately horizontal, characterized by recurring themes that arise periodically along a timeline, then disappear, only to arise again and again amid novel historical contexts, their ‘permanent’ influence determined by the qualities of the interchange and the impressions left in a particular time and place.
There is a quality of ‘eternal return’ in the unfolding of human societies. It’s as if the species is on a quest to replicate externally hidden structures already present in human consciousness in order to perfect them within the contexts of ever new levels of social organization. In light of this I recommend pulling back from the insanities of the present to take a long view toward the possible future.
Adam Curtis considers his films to be strictly journalism.
Having unlimited access to the vast archives of the BBC library, Curtis snips and cuts the myriad fragments of visual history to arrange them around themes guided by his own narrative and analysis. To relegate these works to the narrow field of conventional reporting would be to entirely miss their import and effect. The subjects of his films dive deeply into the wilderness of inherent contradictions between reality and the artificial reproductions of reality, between fact and imagination, between linear narrative and memory, and the many ways we rearrange our perceptions of reality to serve our own agendas. His most recent work, the six part series titled Can’t Get You Out Of My Head focuses on the dialectic between historical and psychological forces that drive individuals into increased feelings of isolation and helplessness and the barriers to effective collective action.
The emotional power of well selected images poised in sharp juxtaposition has been explored as long ago as in the montage techniques pioneered by early filmmakers like Sergei Eisenstein. The use of montage takes us out of the illusory realms of objectivity and well into the territory of ideological expression. Directors like Jean Luc Godard and the ‘underground’ filmmakers of the sixties made radical use of the technique to purposely challenge the conventions of narrative film. While their work was perceived at the time as radical, our immersion in the frenetic medium of television makes them appear prophetic. The rapid disorienting shift between scenarios, the intrusion of seemingly unrelated sequences in commercials and the use of sound as compliment and contrast has increased our ability to shift attention rapidly from one image to another without loosing the narrative thread. Adam Curtis takes advantage of the growing sophistication of our visual language while pushing the form further with each successive work, encouraging us to take larger leaps along with him.
(My favorite film makers of the sixties were the French New Wave’director Jean Luc Goddard and the English director, Nicholas Roeg. Being a contrarian by nature I was always thrilled at the premier of a Godard film on my college campus and particularly pleased when a third to half of the audience walked out in bewilderment or disgust. This I deemed an indication of the film’s success. Both Godard and Roeg used techniques of radical montage to pit direct and sometimes disjointed, emotionally charged images against the linear revelations of plot. Godard went the farthest, often rejecting the very structure of ‘beginning, middle and end’ in films like 2 Or 3 Things I Know About Her, Sympathy For The Devil and See You At Mao. Nicholas Roeg managed to corral these techniques into challenging narratives interrupted by out of synch and out of time sequences taking the viewer out of the linear present into realms of memory, imagination and pure emotion. His use of popular musical icons as actors in films like Performance and The Man Who Fell To Earth became immensely popular with the psychedelic generation.
At least since 1992 with Pandora’s Box, followed by the more ambitious Century Of The Self and into the present Adam Curtis has employed montage with increasing ambition to deliver films that offer historical analysis along with imagery that comes across with devastating emotional impact. To Curtis the purpose of journalism is not merely to report, but to explain. His method is to distill and arrange out of the many sounds and images of a given historical period a presentation of coherent themes that persuade the viewer that his interpretation matches the reality. Journalism in this sense is the art of persuasion.
Human beings are addicted to narrative. If presented with a random set of images our minds will eventually assemble them into stories. If we stare at a wall long enough our minds will weave narratives out of the imperfections in the paint. This is a key to the methods of psychological testing that is critiqued in much of Curtis’ work. Ironically perhaps, it’s the key to his own art and his approach to journalism. When the reporter in a war zone decides to point the lens of their camera they are continually selecting the elements of their own narrative. When Adam Curtis wades through the BBC archives the images he selects are made to fit the preconceived patterns of a story he wishes to tell.
Episode four of his most recent work is titled ‘But what if the people are stupid.’ It’s primary theme is how our disillusionment with institutions born out of the emphasis on individualism in the sixties and seventies morphed into a retreat into nationalism in the eighties and nineties. Curtis pulls together accounts that range widely across the period, from the unsuccessful coup of the Gang Of Four in China to the somewhat tragic life of a transexual pioneer in England, the rise of Al Queda in Iraq, disappointment in the wake of the Live Aid effort and events that led to the crushing of protests in Tiananmen Square. All of these events are bracketed by accounts of psychological experiments carried on by Daniel Kahneman in the seventies leading to the thesis that people’s choices aren’t made primarily on a rational basis but are determined by their previous experiences and how they effect the deeper, mostly subconscious structures in the brain. By focusing on the personal dilemmas and contradictions faced by particular individuals against a backdrop of massive social movements Curtis dramatizes a specific and worldwide shift in our collective experience serving to frustrate our ability to organize coherent resistance to the growing power of elites. This sets us up for the next episode, ‘The Lordly Ones’, which explores the comforting national myths we construct to justify the blunders and atrocities carried out to maintain the rule of dominant capitalist elites over the rest of the world.
On the surface Curtis’ approach resembles that of an historian or archaeologist as much as that of a journalist. All are storytellers and agents of artifice, weaving our perceptions into coherent streams of interpretation and all deal with data fragments from moments gone by. The stories Adam Curtis chooses to tell center on the influence that modern psychology has had on the manipulative techniques of advertising, the growth and dominance of consumerism, and most importantly the isolation of the individual in the shadow of the capitalist state, rendering concepts such as personal freedom and choice almost entirely irrelevant.
We’ve become helpless as collective societies to effectively act to change our circumstances. Instead, our every activity is measured, tabulated and arranged in predictive models that serve to anticipate and then to manipulate our behaviors. Human behavior has been programmed into machinery that uses algorithms to further the power and wealth of economic elites. Only by breaking free of the conceptual prison of the techno-capitalist state can we even begin to imagine a future that meets actual human needs.
Perhaps we expect that journalism and documentary gives us a more accurate glimpse of the real and the true. What we should have learned in an age of propaganda, ‘fake news’ and the Internet is that in the selection and manipulation of images just about any version of ‘reality’ can be made to appear as truth. In the view of Adam Curtis the true value of journalism is to ‘make sense’ of the world in new and original ways that evolve continually with our continual appetite for the new. This is the only way that we can cast off the oppressive chains of the past. We might do well to make his revolution our own.
Thoughtmaybe.com for access to a full catalogue of Adam Curtis Documentaries and many other worthwhile films.
An outstanding interview with Adam Curtis at: Jacobin.com
It’s like a fire came through here,
even though everything is concrete and asphalt.
Whatever it was, it reduced everything to one or two rooms,
concealed behind masks, wearing protective clothing like prison uniforms.
My friends were made crazy, and so was I,
burrowing into ourselves, creatures I no longer recognize.
We are like the abandoned buildings of bankrupt businesses,
withdrawing behind curtains, looking outside and seeing only a strange desert.
The only time I’m not alone is when I leave this empty city, traveling in landscapes, listening to the words coming out of speakers in my metal travel pod.
These voices are my new friends, reliable, regular,
opinionated but never threatened, storytellers.
As I drive among these hills, under the sky,
they comfort me, never judging and never giving advice.
There is always sunlight here,
and these places on the road are never empty.
There is nothing I can do for anyone.
Revelations
Living through the plague and having cancer at the same time is sort of like entering a mysterious room where all the doors and windows are locked, then finding at the back of the room a strange door. Behind that door is another room, smaller, with fewer doors and windows. You get used to the fact that there are at least two exits between you and anything resembling the world outside.
My body started mysteriously falling apart just before Covid descended. It began with my hands and wrists, and gradually it spread to my whole being, until I could barely stand without reaching desperately for breath.
I had ways been proud of my youthful appearance, my enduring health and stamina and ability to heal quickly those rare times I was injured or sick. When people told me they couldn’t believe I was as old as my age I’d tell them smugly, almost arrogantly, that it ran in my family. Perhaps I thought I’d never truly get old, or even die. At seventy most people saw me as fifty, and until this turning I’d mostly felt the way I looked.
In those first months, just when I’d passed the age of seventy, I assumed that the vicissitudes of age had finally caught up with me. The work I’d done for a living had taken its deep toll on my body. My shoulders were a tight mess, the tips of my fingers had grown numb with the effects of carpel tunnel, and when I took out my bike for the first time in the Spring I had trouble lifting my leg high enough to mount. My plans for the future, the paying off of debt and for another sort of life were all in serious question. Suddenly the question of mortality descended like a mysterious spirit taking possession of my bones.
One day early on in the pandemic, before things became really dire and after the panic closed down most of the tourist businesses and bars I took a walk into the center of my city to find a public mailbox and to appreciate the beauty of an early spring day in Santa Fe. The streets were mostly quiet, except for occasional cruisers in huge pickup trucks and a flotilla of motorcycles that wove themselves in circles around the Plaza. A few couples and isolated characters wandered like me, past closed galleries and restaurants, museums and churches, appreciating outside of our dwellings the blossoming trees and an opportunity to briefly breath without our masks and appreciate their scents in the open air. As I walked I listened to podcasts of Zen talks from Mount Tremper in New York while contemplating my own conflicts and contradictions in regards to the present and the future.
Although the final diagnoses wasn’t yet in I could see that the world around me was in straights that reflected my own distress. All that was familiar had changed.
It took months to find answers, the search delayed by the plague, as alarms were sounded and offices for inquiry and treatment were closed down. At long last I was diagnosed with cancer and by that time my hands were severely crippled and I was no longer able to work. As the plague spread its shadow across the land I was, like most of us, forced to retreat into my own private wilderness.
Meanwhile, as we careened toward an election and a clash of alternate realities, the deeper shadows of collective victimization had become the undercurrent of an American culture overcome by grievance fed by media madmen. America was sicker than I was. The creeping diseases that we’d been feeding for decades had broken fully to the surface and the future filled with hope had been replaced with a question of survival. Most of us prayed that whatever was overcoming us would just end, but it had become harder to see the future beyond the violence, the isolation and the plague.
My birthdate is the same as Thomas Jefferson’s, April 13th. From what I’ve read, I can personally relate to his personality of restless passions and contradictions. Particularly familiar to me is a sense that my vision far exceeds my own grasp. Jefferson was a privileged and prosperous inheritor of great wealth in an economy based on slavery. As an obsessive tabulator of facts and figures and an elevated member of a race and culture that considered itself inherently superior to all others, his restless mind wouldn’t allow him to reside in any fixed station. His thoughts propelled him toward an ideal world – nonexistent in his time, where every human being had – by virtue of being, inherent and inalienable rights. His was a world where the term ‘human being’ hadn’t yet reached an equitable definition. I live in a different world, where the notion that the welfare of one is inseparable from the welfare of the whole is contradicted daily. As a nation we worship the pursuit of personal wealth as the perfect embodiment of pure ego and self interest, substantially devoid of considerations that transcend the possession of individual power and the illusion of control. We have, in fact, managed to turn every ideal taught in our various catechisms of church and school entirely on their head.
Now, one year since the plague jumped us I’m looking at a civilization that is slowly coming apart. Although the traffic is once again flowing as people strive to maintain some kind of life as usual, there are more closed and abandoned businesses, empty real estate and a pervasive feeling of alienation and wistful uncertainty. Friendships have become more distant and physical contact still mostly a wishful dream. The brief month-long sigh that so many of us felt after the election is replaced already by the anger and dread and fallout promoted leading up to it. Even if the Covid shadow passes us by we’ll still be left with the deeper shadows of racism, bigotry and general thuggery at the heart of the long American nightmare. The monster has been unleashed and is tearing out our heart. The next two years will most likely resemble the past five years. We are in parallel acts of slowly dying and transforming as a culture and the serpent is not about to let us off the cross.
When I look in the mirror I see an emaciated old man, someone who has aged ten years in one. There are red rings around my eyes, my teeth and gums are hurting, I look like a starving inmate. At the same time the doctors tell me that my numbers are improving. My stamina is up. My hands are still crippled but may be slowly getting better month by month. I still can’t walk very far and I can’t get on my bicycle. Soon I’ll be seeking another place to live, and it may be somewhere out on the road.
We are told as Americans that there’s a light at the end of this tunnel, that our numbers are improving. I’m not sure what the numbers mean anymore. I’ve been on the list for a vaccination for several months but haven’t been given a date. That all appears distant and unreal, more than two exit doors and a couple of hallways away. Whenever I hear the phrase ‘back to normal’ it evokes a feeling of mass delusion. Life is something that passes quickly, day by day.
Arclist 