The Obama Generation Is Here

Ok, this is the "best of times" part.  Start with the New York Times:

Demonstrators flooded streets across the globe in public protests on Saturday, calling for action against gun violence. Hundreds of thousands of marchers turned out, in the most ambitious show of force yet from a student-driven movement that emerged after the recent massacre at a South Florida high school.

Yolanda Renee King, the 9 year old granddaughter of Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke at the Washington demo:

"My grandfather had a dream that his four little children would not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character," she said, referencing her grandfather's famous speech. "I have a dream that enough is enough. That this should be a gun-free world. Period."

Celebrities, political and otherwise, joined, including Paul McCartney at the New York demo, held near where John Lennon was shot and killed.

President Obama tweeted:

Michelle and I are so inspired by all the young people who made today’s marches happen. Keep at it. You’re leading us forward. Nothing can stand in the way of millions of voices calling for change.

New Yorker report on the Washington march included:

By noon, it was impossible to move easily through the crowd. Teens waved homemade signs (“Hunting Season is Over”; “No, I’m Pretty Sure Guns Kill People”) and huddled together for photos. Poppy Fleming, a nine-year-old student at Hartwood Elementary, in Stafford County, Virginia, stood with Deborah and Michael Fleming, her grandparents. She held up a sign decorated with the names and locations of various mass shootings. In the middle, she’d written, in magic marker, “Am I Next?”

“We can teach her about civil disobedience,” Deborah said. “We can teach her how to vote.”

Boston

A Politico story included details of the Washington march:

The city’s public transportation system was bracing for long lines and crowds. Restaurants offered discounted meals to marchers and the ride-sharing app Lyft offered free rides to the march. Local families have been offering up their homes to students with nowhere to stay.

It goes on:
Many adults took to the streets, too, saying they were inspired by personal experiences with gun violence. Danny Robb, a 64-year-old retired Air Force colonel, traveled from than 7,000 miles from Okinawa, Japan to Washington. On March 24, 1998 — 20 years ago today— two gunmen shot up his daughter’s middle school in Jonesboro, Arkansas, killing five people. She happened to stay home that day, but a friend she sat next to in class was killed.

Now, Robb said he hopes young people will succeed where his generation fell short.  “In the military, you’re taught that to be a good leader you have to be a good follower,” Robb said. “And the kids need to take the lead on this.”

Marches across the world and across the US included an estimated 30,000 in downtown Pittsburgh, one of the largest political gathering there ever.

The Hill: seven memorable moments from the Washington event.

History may see this as the first action of the Obama Generation.  When we marched on Washington in 1963, we changed the country and changed the world. There have been many marches since that have had lesser effect.  Only time will tell about this one.  But it clearly says there is a hopeful element in the coming generations, and their influence may well be felt soon, even if they can't vote yet, through parents and those they persuade with their intelligence and passion.  (They register a ton of voters on Saturday.)

Bolton from the Blue.2

Eric Levitz:

"Last night was the darkest of the past 14 months.

From day one, it was clear that America’s election of Donald Trump was an act of self-harm. But the president’s hiring of John Bolton has radically increased the risk that it will also prove to be one of mass murder on a world-historic scale.

The top national security adviser to the most ignorant and impressionable president in modern memory is a man whose lust for war is so rabid, it makes Senate Republicans uncomfortable."

The Washington Post editorial board:

"John Bolton, whom President Trump has said will take over the position next month, is unsuited for that role. His record is that of a rigid, bombastic ideologue with a history of bullying colleagues and twisting intelligence. His advocacy of extreme policies, including preventive war against North Korea and Iran, could lead Mr. Trump and the country to catastrophe."

The New York Times editorial board, in an editorial entitled Yes, John Bolton Really Is That Dangerous :

"There are few people more likely than Mr. Bolton is to lead the country into war. His selection is a decision that is as alarming as any Mr. Trump has made."

Fred Kaplan at Slate, in his post titled It’s Time to Panic Now
John Bolton’s appointment as national security adviser puts us on a path to war:
"John Bolton’s appointment as national security adviser—a post that requires no Senate confirmation—puts the United States on a path to war. And it’s fair to say President Donald Trump wants us on that path.

After all, Trump gave Bolton the job after the two held several conversations (despite White House chief of staff John Kelly’s orders barring Bolton from the building)."


In his post, America Takes the Next Step Toward Tyranny, Andrew Sullivan lines up in some rational order the recent events that culminate in both a dictatorship backed by a cult (the R party, morphing into the N party) and before that is complete (perhaps as an instrument to complete it): "War is coming. And there will be nothing and no one to stop him."

The basic points are that Bolton is a carbon copy of the worst aspects of the antipresident but with ideological fanaticism: he is a bully with no sense of proportion and little impulse control.  And that the antipresident is systematically getting rid of anybody in the WH or cabinet who can even attempt to restrain him.

For example, this from Kaplan (above):
Bolton is not likely to put up with a professional staff, and the flood of White House exiles will soon intensify. One subject of discussion at Bolton’s Senate hearings, back in 2005, was his intolerance of any views that differed from his own. He displayed this trait most harshly when, as undersecretary of state, he tried to fire two intelligence analysts who challenged his (erroneous) view that Cuba was developing biological weapons and supplying the weapons to rogue regimes.

There are even worse examples of pathological bullying on record; in one harrowing case at least, of a woman.  Put it all together and you see why panic buttons were being pushed all over Washington.  But the consequences are likely to be felt by American soldiers and mostly by faceless multitudes abroad.

In her New Yorker column John (“Bomb Iran”) Bolton, the New Warmonger in the White House, Robin Wright quotes:
Jon Soltz, an Iraq War veteran and chairperson of VoteVets, the largest progressive veterans group, called Bolton’s appointment “downright frightening.” In a statement, he said, “A man who was key in sending me and thousands and thousands of my fellow troops to Iraq is now the National Security Adviser to Donald Trump. Let there be no mistake—there is no war for regime change, anywhere, that John Bolton wasn’t for. He sees troops not as human beings, with families, but as expendable resources, in his real-life game of Risk. We are undoubtedly closer to a war in Korea, now, and a war with Iran.”

Levitz ends his post with this preemptive eulogy for thousands of victims and for peace:

American voters, elected officials, policymakers, political operatives, and journalists shoulder a responsibility much greater than that borne by their counterparts in most (if not all) other countries. How the greatest military power in world history chooses to govern itself has implications for people far beyond our borders. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis aren’t walking the Earth today because of the invasion our government launched 15 years ago this week.

Picture them alive, standing before you in a crowd stretching out past the horizon. Hear the cacophony of their collective conversations, prayers, children’s laughter. Look into their faces. See the weddings they did not celebrate, the babies left unborn. Read the poems they did not write. Rue the apologies left undelivered, unrequited loves left unlamented, parents unmourned, friendships unformed and un-betrayed, amends left unmade, and all the other sorrowful, wondrous gifts of human existence that were incinerated by our cruise missiles, eviscerated by our assault rifles, or snuffed out by the fascistic death cult that both left in their wake.

Imagine 20,000 South Koreans joining them, each day."

Bolton From the Blue/Because You Can

With the appointment of John Bolton as National Security Advisor to the antipresident, the Armageddon clock moves to 30 seconds to midnight.

Let Jonathan Chiat's column stand in for a nearly unanimous view outside of Fox News, the White House and the booby hatch.  Bolton is an evil idiot and bully--so he fits right in.

Bolton has publicly advised the U.S. to bomb both Iran and North Korea. The Iran nuclear deal is now certainly toast, with international ramifications and threats to the Middle East, at least.

If I'm South Korea, I'm now listening to the sympathetic cooing coming from China and Russia, because the U.S. is starting to look like their worst enemy.  And yes, I mean South Korea.  Because they will take the brunt of a U.S. war on North Korea. Would South Korea entertain a strategic alliance with China instead, to guarantee its borders?  Could be more than a trade war there, if that wasn't enough.

 It's pretty much official now--Fox News is the presidency.  For as long as it lasts.

Oh, and that lawyer that left?  Veteran reporter Jeffrey Toobin at the New Yorker now joins the chorus: John Dowd’s Fall May Mean That Robert Mueller Is Next to Go.




So there's this episode of Madame Secretary, a series we're watching that I have mixed feelings about.  But this episode (2nd season, ep. 13 "The Middle Way") ends with a conversation in a karaoke bar between two top aides to the Secretary of State.  Blake (played by Erich Bergen) is still upset by all the doomsday predictions in a department report on the world in 2030.  Nadine (Bebe Neuwrith) tells him that when she was in grade school, they had Duck & Cover drills instead of fire drills because nuclear war was a daily possibility.

Neuwirth--and presumably her character--were born in 1958, so while the high point of those drills was in the early to mid 1950s, it's possible some schools were still doing them in the 1960s.  But she makes her point: thermonuclear war was a daily possibility well into the 1980s--and is still an only somewhat lessened daily possibility. With no warning, thermonuclear missiles raining down. That was the original "bolt from the blue."

 Baby Boomers grew up with the conscious possibility of the end of the world in the blink of an eye.  We had to go on living.

She says that if they do their jobs right, maybe that future could be averted.  But if we don't get our act together, yes, it's going to be very bad.

Nadine then tells Blake to go up and sing.  "Why?" he said, as if it is just one more futile denial of doom.

"Because you can," she says.

And he does.  A very nice version of "Fire and Rain."  Now might be a good time to hear it again.  Because you can.

Present Past: Crosscurrents of Memory

Memories can be brought into consciousness by an almost simultaneous complex of sense impressions.  And those memories can be affected by the crosscurrents of time.

This time there's no expert saying this.  Just my own observation.  For example:

At some moment in the recent past, I was scanning the supermarket shelves for the brand of teas I prefer (Stash) when I happened to notice for the first time in a long time a familiar-looking black and red box, with an almost forgotten name, written in fake cursive handwriting: "Constant Comment."

It took me back, though not to childhood.  Growing up in Greensburg (western PA), the adults of my parents' generation drank coffee.  When I got to be of the age that coffee was no longer believed to "stunt your growth," I drank coffee, as well.

People drank tea mostly in the summer, when it was iced tea.  My mother probably made herself a cup of hot tea once in awhile.  So there was always a box of Lipton or Salada tea bags in the kitchen cupboard.

Then tea became a Thing in the 1960s.  Beginning in the mid-60s, the Beatles and the groups that followed in the English Invasion made everything English fashionable and gear, and that included tea.  Especially when the boom in British movies made it over to our TV sets and theaters.

But we were still basically stuck with Lipton and Salada tea bags. I remembered that at some point I became aware of Constant Comment, a tea of unique flavor. It was the tea that the hippest girls served.  It came in a tin in those days, and if you were truly hip, it was loose tea, not bags.  Those tins were in the kitchens of off-campus apartments, and particularly after our campus arts center got a ceramics studio, served in a ceramic tea pot and ceramic mugs.  In my memory I always see a young woman with long hair pouring the Constant Comment.

It wouldn't be long before its hipness was overrun as more exotic brands became available, with green tea the accompaniment to various forms of the cannabis. But Constant Comment was the first of the tea variations.

With those vague memories and images in mind, and a pretty good price on the shelf, I bought a box.  Then the distinctive smell of the tea when I made a cup evoked a more specific memory.

I remembered the afternoon I was first served Constant Comment.  I was probably still in high school, or maybe an early year home from college, and made one of our adventurous forays into Pittsburgh with my friend Mike.   We visited his older sister Mary Ann, who lived in a basement apartment in Squirrel Hill.  She worked as a buyer for a major department store.  I had no idea what a buyer did (and even now I'm not completely clear on the matter.)  But she was a single young woman with an important job and her own apartment in the big city of Pittsburgh, so she was the acme of sophistication.

We sat in her living room, looking at the feet and legs of passers-by through the window we faced, and she served us Constant Comment, which is basically a blend of black tea and sweet spices, dominated by an orange flavor from orange rinds.  I can't say I was immediately crazy about this unfamiliar taste, but it felt like a rite of passage.  My world was expanding.

The memory of the orange smell and taste might have been reinforced by something I think I remember being on her coffee table: a small ceramic bowl of those tiny orange balls that I was to see on other coffee tables in those years.  But when I heard the Leonard Cohen song Suzanne, with the line "and she serves you tea and oranges that come all the way from China," I thought about this moment.

That line, by the way, was very effective in supporting the sense of special mystery about "Suzanne" that went with the mesmerizing melody and (in his version) Cohen's hypnotic voice.  Today it's sort of a funny line. Oranges that come all the way from China was a fantastic and exotic idea then, whereas now of course virtually everything comes from China, except maybe oranges.

My association of the line with Constant Comment may seem either a poetic leap or insultingly reductive, but it turns out to be neither: just accurate.  Cohen himself explained that the song is based on a young woman who lived in a riverside apartment in Old Montreal, and served him...Constant Comment tea.  The rest is poetic license.

The problem with this coincidence however is that I probably didn't hear the song "Suzanne" until several years after that afternoon tea.  I first heard Judy Collins' hit version when it was popular in 1966.  It was on Cohen's first album, which I remember either I had or a housemate did, released in 1968.  (And then there's that song "So Long, Marianne" that may have reinforced that memory as well.)

So while the association of the tea and that afternoon formed at the time, the association of the song--which likely strengthened the memory--did not occur until afterwards.  One of those crosscurrents of memory.

Present: A Quotation.5 and Comments

“From the beginning the useless people set up a shriek for ‘practical business men’[in government.]  By this they meant men who had become rich by placing their personal interests before those of the country, and measuring the success of every activity by the pecuniary profit it brought to them and to those on whom they depended for their supplies of capital.

 The pitiable failure of some conspicuous samples from the first batch we tried of these poor devils helped to give the whole public side of the war an air of monstrous and hopeless farce. They proved not only that they were useless for public work, but that in a well-ordered nation they would never have been allowed to control private enterprise.”
G.B. Shaw

George Bernard Shaw wrote these words shortly after World War I.  Through all the spectacular daily changes, how little has deeply changed.

Literary Hub asked a number of authors who had recently published books what it was like to be out promoting their work in the first year of the antipresident.  Kim Stanley Robinson, who was on a book tour for his novel New York 2140 about the climate crisis future, said this:

"I ignored the presidency of Donald Trump. He is a blip and an aberration in a process of coming to grips with climate change that has been gathering momentum for about 20 years now. We’ve designed cleaner technologies for energy and transport and although installing them worldwide is a massive task, it can be done and it will be. It will be the work of human civilization in the 21st century. 

The Paris Accord is an agreement of world historical importance. The United States will rejoin it, having never really left it, and on we’ll go. The targets set by the Accord get us only about halfway to the carbon reductions we need, but when we achieve that first half as a global society, the second half will get easier, because the momentum will be in that direction. And the need for it will be more and more evident. We’ll do it for the children.

It’s true that Trump and his team are stupidly destructive of much that is good. They are tearing the social fabric, and enjoying that in the usual way of thugs and vandals. There’s a sickness there that is disturbing to see. But we’ll knit the fabric back together and carry on. His supporters are a minority that is shrinking. Remember Gramsci’s pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. Be angrily optimistic and fight for justice and the generations to come."

It is a wonderful perspective.  But as much as we would like to let as much of this current administration go by and pass into history with as little pain as possible, we must be forewarned, we must be ready for what still might come.

Specifically for what happens if there is war.  Shaw noted how fast everything changed from the day before war was declared to the day after.  A virus of hysteria infects everyone.  Civil liberties vanish.  Simple criticism of the government, even a wisecrack, becomes suspect and criminal.

Along with the usually distant hellish destruction, this always happens.  It happened in World War I, WWII, Vietnam, the open-ended War on Terror. The differences this time are the power of the Internet and social media to punish dissenters instantly and with personal destruction, and of course, the most authoritarian-minded occupant of the White House in American history.  So be wary, and beware.

The other caveat I would add is that while this may be a blip in history, the amount of poison being poured into the American government and culture, and indeed into the world, will take a long time to drain.  It took President Obama eight years to bring the country part way back from the eight Bush years.  But the poison injected by this administration in little more than a year seems even more widespread.

But Obama was in fact President for eight years, which constituted the childhood, adolescence and young adulthood of millions.

  There was a Kennedy generation; there will be an Obama generation.  This is my greatest solace.  Some of them are already out there, demanding action on guns.  They will be "angrily optimistic" and they will "fight for justice and the generations to come."  

The Time Machine.3: Traveller's Progress

“The broadest and ultimately the most far-reaching effect of his [Wells’] work was the introduction into literature of a new awareness of the future.”
Roslynn D. Haynes

Though the 1960 George Pal film was in color, this is the most
complete view I found of its now iconic version of the time machine.

The Time Traveller goes down the long corridor to his laboratory, makes the final adjustments on his Time Machine, and begins his journey. “I drew a breath, set my teeth, gripped the starting lever with both hands, and went off with a thud.”

Like any good machine, this one has controls, including in which direction it can be sent. The Time Traveller could go to the past and witness a spectacular historical event.

Instead he makes history by choosing the future. Eventually that choice will shape how we've thought about the future ever since.

The choice of the future was not foreordained. In Mark Twain’s story, “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” the journey is to the past. Rip Van Winkle wakes in the future, but he fell asleep in the past.

I first read the story in this Classics
Illustrated  comic bookversion in the 1950s,
with its 20th century time machine

But an imagined future was the destination of several late 19th century utopian tales, notably Samuel Bellamy’s Looking Backward and News From Nowhere by William Morris, a book Wells mentions in a short story. And at first, a future utopia is the destination the Traveller imagines for his journey.

Though the above named novels portrayed socialist utopias, others--including capitalists and middle class society generally-- confidently expected a future developing towards perfection. For the great faith of the machine age was Progress.

The machine and the idea of progress grew up together. While progress in human knowledge and society was championed by individual thinkers in the 16th and 17th century, and was part of the rationale for the American and French Revolutions, material progress began to take hold more comprehensively in the 18th century, the dawn of the industrial age.

Writers such as Voltaire and Kant were advocates, but progress soon became the common cry of industry, and was its one-word rationale for the massive destruction in the landscape and in society involved in the building of industrial infrastructure.

Progress as a self-evident argument bulldozed its way through the next two hundred years. “Progress is our most important product” was General Electric’s indelible mid-20th century slogan. But it was in the mid-19th century that the acolytes of progress found (or appropriated) a scientific foundation.

Wells’ friend and contemporary George W. Shaw wrote of Charles Darwin: “He had the luck to please everybody with an ax to grind.” Figures of the time seized upon one or another of many interpretations of Darwinian evolution—usually the one that comported with their previous beliefs.

One of these was progress. By a process of natural selection over time, Darwin showed, life forms become increasingly more complex: from the amoeba to humanity, or up the long ladder from the lower animals through the primates to Homo sapiens.

Human society progresses in the same way, proponents reasoned: from primitive to technically sophisticated, small to large, poor to rich, caves to cities, stone axes to the electric dynamo.

So human society—and its machines—would naturally be advanced in the future almost beyond imagining. That’s what the Traveller was expecting—or at least hoping for.

The Traveller put on the brakes in the very far future—A.D. 802, 701 by the Time Machine’s gauge. He lands in a hailstorm that possibly his machine created. There’s a moment of suspense when he can’t yet see what’s beyond the veil of frosty water.

He finds himself in a park-like clearing, surrounded by lovely but unfamiliar foliage and in view of several impressive structures in the distance. He sees figures coming towards him—human figures.

But instead of commanding figures of the future, they are but four feet tall, with small features. One approaches him, “a very beautiful and graceful creature,” a “fragile thing out of futurity.” At first he is charmed.

But he soon finds they are passive and simple, “with the intellectual level of one of our five year old children.” He admits that “I had always anticipated that the people of the year Eight Hundred and Two Thousand odd would be incredibly in front of us in knowledge, art, everything.”

“A flow of disappointment rushed across my mind. For a moment I felt that I had built the Time Machine in vain.”

The Eloi—as they called themselves—are a parody of progress. To deepen the ironic comeuppance to this popular misinterpretation of evolution, they look like humanity perfected. Wearing simple tunics suggesting the Greek philosophical ideal of Plato’s Republic, they live in a place akin to paradise.

The Eloi of this Eden eat only the fruit of the trees. They have no apparent animal adversaries, or disease-bearing insects. They serve as a sardonic turnabout for those scandalized by the idea that humans could be descended from apes or any animal form. The Eloi as end product of civilization are the epitome of refinement, wandering in beautiful and vacuous helplessness.

Evolution does not mean progress, although the word itself seems to suggest it. “Evolution” literally means a kind of rolling out, an unfolding, a flowering. It suggests a fulfillment of a potential, or a destiny.  As such, it was an unfortunate choice because Darwin's theory of natural selection did not guarantee progress towards an ideal form or situation.

Darwin rarely used the word “evolution,” probably because that isn’t what he meant. (Few of his contemporaries used it either at first—it was at least a decade before “evolution” replaced “Darwinism” as the handle for Darwin’s theory.)

Darwin also cautioned that natural selection could result in less complexity, and even retrogression or degeneration, as Wells learned from Huxley.

The Traveller will explore these possibilities, as well as other misconceptions of Darwin’s work. But in these first moments in the future, he knows that progress is not inevitable, or at least not a permanent upward process ending in perfection. And without inevitability, the future may depend a great deal more on what is done and not done in the present than the Traveller’s dinner guests can as yet realize.

To be continued...For earlier posts in this series, click on the Soul of the Future label below.