Occupy Washington

It was an extraordinary week just over, especially in what it said about the dangers presented by the apprentice dictator in the White House--the now always imminent dangers to the world with the nuclear codes and armed forces in his hands, the  deep dangers to the moral and institutional basis for a civilized nation as it faces an already perilous future.

Jeff Greenfield writes cogently about the moral danger represented by his response to Charlottesville:

"The more convincing explanation for Trump’s moral failure is that he is, and always has been, completely disconnected from any understanding of the American political tradition. It is why, uniquely among chief executives, he almost never quotes a past president or political figure or thinker, nor references any part of the country’s past. For Trump, there is no past; only himself, rising as a self-creation out of the mist. He feels no need to speak against the poison of bigotry because he has no clue about how that poison has infected our past, and still infects our present.

Among the many ways that Donald Trump is the most manifestly unfit president in American history, put this one near the top of the list."

John Cassidy writes about his alarming warmongering:

"As many commentators, myself included, have pointed out before, Trump’s Presidency represents an unprecedented challenge to the American system of government. Up until this point, some parts of the system—the courts, the federal civil service, the media, and other institutions of civil society—have withstood the challenge pretty well. But it was always likely that the biggest test would come in the area of national security, where the institutional constraints on the President are less effective. Now, it looks like the moment of truth is upon us, and so far the response has been alarmingly weak. Unless that changes, Trump might well drag the country into a catastrophic war."

Cassidy asks the question, who can stop him?  And the answer so far is, no one.  Congress has a couple of ways to get him out of office, but neither party has shown any interest in the attempt.  The opposition within Republicans has been growing-- especially this weekend--while the Democrats seem focused on 2018.  The presumption has been that they all could move incrementally and wait for the cover given by Robert Mueller handing out indictments and making his report, while 2018 might provide a more favorable Congress.

But last week that long game seemed suddenly way too long.  I've concluded that the only way things might happen sooner is enormous public pressure: either a real General Strike for a meaningful period, or an Occupy Washington by millions of protestors, who don't leave.  Or both.

There were demonstrations on Sunday all over the US about Charlottesville (the photos on this post are from Chicago, via Chicago Tribune.)  But it will take a lot more than that.

A couple of follow-ups to recent posts here.  On my Imagine This post:   The Atlantic reports that a 17 minute film made in the 1940s about how fascism can take over a country has gone viral on the internet. (Or at least a 2 minute clip from it.)  The Atlantic post includes the video, and it's here at the Internet Archive in a larger format.  This is the imagination at work.

On a different subject, Politico has a feature about a successful program used to treat Native Americans in Alaska with an integrated physical and mental health program, that works so well that it seems ripe for replication everywhere.

 This is more than a change to established practice.  It would have been considered unscientific heresy in past decades.  It took the heretics of  Esalen and New Age advocates in the 60s to begin changing that.  Now, after 50 years of ideas on integrated healing and experience with holistic medicine, it just seems like common sense.  Blame that on the 60s, too.

Imagine This

Around here we sometimes employ metaphor to make a point or suggest a texture, or recently, a direction.  Sometimes it's akin to those dystopian tales that are cautionary tales about future possibilities: a warning.

Then something like Saturday happens and we seem suddenly closer to seeing the somewhat metaphorical become actual.

The largest public gathering of white nationalists and neo-Nazis in a generation, or so some say, happened Friday night and Saturday in Charlottesville, Virginia.  On Friday they incited violence.  On Saturday a likely white nationalist from Ohio drove deliberately into a crowd of peaceful counter-demonstrators marching in support of diversity, killing one immediately and injuring a score of others.

Then Homegrown Hitler spoke against the violence, without condemning or even mentioning the white nationalist haters.  New York's story quotes his response: But rather than clear the extremely low bar of denouncing neo-Nazis for causing mayhem and death, Trump took a different approach.

“We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides — on many sides,” he said.

He distanced himself from the events by making it clear that such unrest is nothing new, offered a few words of tone-deaf pablum about coming together as a country, and blew a possible dog whistle at racists by calling on Americans to “cherish our history.”

When a reporter shouted out a question about whether he wants the supports of white nationalists, the president ignored it.

After an immediate outcry on social media over Trump’s “many sides” wording, a White House spokesperson confirmed that Trump meant what he said, since “there was violence between protestors and counter-protestors today.”

As for a reason for this response, it was all too clear why:

Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, a Trump supporter who was in Charlottesville on Saturday, quickly replied. “I would recommend you take a good look in the mirror & remember it was White Americans who put you in the presidency, not radical leftists,” he wrote.

Asked by a reporter in New Jersey whether he wanted the support of white nationalists, dozens of whom wore red Make America Great Again hats during the Charlottesville riots, Trump did not respond."

There was almost universal condemnation of his statement, even among Republicans.  One piece by Chris Cilizza of CNN is representative.  He notes that part of the statement appeared to be a pre-emptive defense against those who point to his previous statements and behavior (and lack of them, as in his silence when a bomb was thrown into a Minnesota mosque) as encouraging racist/ alt.right/ neo-Nazi violence.

That's likely the subtext to President Obama's tweet on Saturday quoting Nelson Mandela:"No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion..."

But this is a good deal more chilling than the usually nauseating statements by the apprentice dictator in the White House.  This is getting into Hitler territory in an astonishingly literal way.  Tacit support for actual neo-Nazis? White nationalists (like the one who is Homegrown Hitler's chief policy advisor) chanting the racist Nazi slogan Blood and Soil?  And it gets worse.

Look at this photo (all photos on this page are from Politico.)   The caption reads: Carrying body armor and combat weapons, white nationalists, neo-Nazis and members of the "alt-right" evacuate comrades who were pepper-sprayed after the "Unite the Right" rally was declared an unlawful gathering by Virginia State Police.

Now we can see the fruits, not only of the 2016 election, but the insane interpretation of the fourth amendment and the result of openly armed neo-Nazis on public streets during a fractious political demonstration.

An unofficial army of armed civilians helped begin the Nazi rise to absolute power in Germany.  Suddenly "Homegrown Hitler" doesn't sound so metaphorical.

I picked some day to turn the page of my current New York Review of Books to read a review of a documentary on the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi crimes and more recent instances of war crimes.  The review quotes Hannah Arendt's phrase "a criminal lack of imagination."  Better to imagine the implications now than to suffer the consequences when the "unimaginable" happens.

EndTimes

After Hiroshima, many people--from scientists to ordinary citizens to journalists to high ranking military officers and even a few politicians--realized that nuclear war could threaten to end global civilization.  For at least a generation beginning in the 1960s, that threat was very real, and people felt it.

Today the end of civilization from nuclear war is still possible, if it cascades and  causes enough damage that civilization can't come back.  And while it is of less conscious concern today--except perhaps for times like the past week or so--it still is a background fear.

Since the early 1990s, many people--from scientists to ordinary citizens to journalists to high ranking military officers and even a few politicians--realized that the climate crisis could end global civilization.  Since around 2009, that threat became very real, and people feel it.

It would be interesting to track the similarities and differences in our responses to these two threats, and I may do a little of that here in passing.  But basically, this post is about the climate crisis and the end of civilization.

In early July, New York Magazine published an article by David Wallace-Wells titled "The Uninhabitable Earth" which took existing data on climate, and instead of choosing the most conservative prediction of consequences, or the happy medium as official reports often do, it chose the worst.  Not the worst imaginable, but the worst possible.

In Part I: Doomsday, subtitled Peering beyond scientific reticence, the author began:  "It is, I promise, worse than you think...

Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century."

I won't go into the details.  The author also provides an annotated version.  But the piece quickly became the most read article on the New York site ever, and started a controversy, including among climate scientists and activists.  Among them were climate scientist Michael Mann, one of the past targets of  denialists, who criticized the story for being "doomist."

Besides critiquing aspects of the science cited, Mann and others expressed the view that such doom drains people of hope, and in despair they will refuse to do what's necessary to address the causes of the climate crisis because it just won't matter.  Mann even took to the Washington Post to declare that "Doomsday scenarios are as harmful as climate change denial" (as the headline of his oped says.)  Emily Atkin in the New Republic called it "Climate disaster porn."

Others disagreed.  Susan Matthews in Slate wrote that ""alarmism is what we need to fight climate change" and that the Wallace-Wells story wasn't "scary enough." Science News looked at both sides of the question.

All of this was happening just as Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Sequel was being released.  In her New Yorker review of the film, Michelle Nijhuis mentioned the New York Magazine controversy, and seemed to come down against it, in praising an element of the movie:

"Psychologists have studied the dynamics of what advertisers call “fear appeals,” and they have found that while fear is very good at getting our attention, it’s not very good at keeping it. For that, the scary stuff must be followed by solutions that are small enough to be practical but large enough to be meaningful. Wallace-Wells’s article, “The Uninhabitable Earth,” successfully got attention... But it offers little in the way of fixes, nodding briefly to the allure—if not the wisdom—of geoengineering and suggesting that civilization will eventually cobble together a substantive response to climate change, if only because the alternative is so appalling. “An Inconvenient Sequel,” which is a work of advocacy rather than journalism, pivots efficiently away from its disaster reel and toward solutions, cheering the rise of cheaper renewables and the promise of the Paris climate accord, even in the wake of the U.S.’s withdrawal."

Perhaps surprisingly then, Gore (who used to talk about "solving the climate crisis and calls himself an optimist) not only praises Wallace-Wells article, but appeared with him in a live program after a film screening.  Gore said:
"I really admired the article you wrote, took note of some of the snipes and critiques, and I agreed with some of the climate writers that I most respect, like David Roberts and Joe Romm, who said, good for David Wallace-Wells, it’s a real wake-up call. We need to be aware of how things could go really badly wrong."

Even as this controversy was ongoing, news kept coming of how much worse things are getting.  Just a sampling of the stories, studies, and headlines: 
Hopes of mild climate change dashed by new research (the Guardian),
Earth to warm 2 degrees Celsius by the end of this century, studies say (CNN: 2 degrees is the red line scientists use to indicate the likely tipping point into irreversible and catastrophic climate change, hence some of the headlines that follow.)

Climate change will almost certainly heat the world so much it can never recover, major study finds: There's only a 10 per cent chance we'll avoid widespread drought, extreme weather and dangerous increases in sea level (the Independent.)  Similar stories ran in Wired, Science Daily, elsewhere.

And it kept on coming:Climate change pushing Asia towards doom, says report  (Gulf Times.) Climate change to cause humid heatwaves that will kill even healthy people (Guardian.) Extreme weather 'could kill up to 152,000 a year' in Europe by 2100 (BBC.)

In the past few days, there's the leaked final draft of a US interagency report which Slate said "paints an unsettling picture of dramatically rising temperatures that are already affecting the lives of Americans..."  The New York Times had extensive excerpts of this extensive study that confirms global heating due to carbon pollution and other "human activities," and the likely extent of consequences felt right now and in the future.

Meanwhile other headlines confirmed what is happening now. Suicides of nearly 60,000 Indian farmers linked to climate change, study claims (Guardian), We're choking on smoke in Seattle (New York Times: triple digit heat and smoke from forests burning in British Columbia), etc. etc. and finally:2016 Was Hot, Weird, and Unprecedented, Says NOAA (Atlantic) as the US agency formally announced that 2016 was (stop me if you've heard this one) the hottest year on record.

So what does it all mean?  What, if anything, is different?  And who is right in this doomist debate?

These latest studies, particularly predicting a range of the temperature rise already "baked in" which we can't do anything to stop, as well as how steeply humanity will have to cut greenhouse gas pollution to prevent much higher temperatures, tend towards confirming worse case scenarios.

But some observers have been quietly acknowledging this for some time--starting especially from the shocking acceleration in Arctic and Antarctic melting nearly a decade ago, which is still accelerating.  Here's what I think has changed.  While a cascade of possible effects would probably have to happen to make much of the planet uninhabitable by the end of this century,  the possibility has gone up that these global heating effects, plus socioeconomic and probably military effects they cause, will lead to a breakdown in global civilization by the mid to late 22nd century.  And yes, it could get worse from there.

That does not mean things will remain as they are until one of these vague dates in the future.  It could get very much worse suddenly at some point (a pulse of sea level rise, for instance) but it is likely to get gradually worse, with ever more obvious consequences.  (Several years ago, some experts suggested that the reality and direction of change will be obvious to everyone by 2050.  They may have revised that date by now.)

What is all but certain is that we haven't begun to imagine, let alone face, the consequences of the climate crisis.  As far as I've seen it hasn't been really done in fiction.  Kim Stanley Robinson acknowledges the climate crisis as the cause of major changes but doesn't write about the worst of those changes.  And doomsday explorations like The Road don't relate their apocalypse to the climate crisis.

Because of global heating, life in the future is very likely to be very different than it is today.  The life of every person is going to be different, beginning at least with children now in school.  In some ways they may have more fulfilling lives, but they may well have harder lives.  Gore says we're in the early stages of a revolution, and those lives may be in the thick of that, addressing the causes and effects of the climate crisis, including at very basic levels.

 Beyond that, and beyond the next generation or two, it's hard to say.  But it will never again be as it is now.  Not this planet, not civilization, not humanity.

As for doom, there's always a difficulty in discussing apocalyptic futures, in that this is a big world, and the future is even bigger.  Describe a dystopian future, and there are probably people somewhere living in it right now.  So whose future are we talking about?

But I believe there is one aspect of the future that seems extremely likely, and this touches upon the doom debate.  For years, people in the environmental community especially have refused to talk directly about one probable consequence of the likely cascade of effects caused not only by the climate crisis itself but by mass species extinction, deadly pollution of the oceans, deforestation and other ongoing destruction to the Earth as a living system.

That consequence was once whispered about, borrowing a term from plant biology, as "dieback."  Human dieback.  It is likely that Earth of the future, perhaps the relatively near future, will have a significantly smaller human population, and while some of that decrease will occur naturally, some or much of it will be the result of mass deaths.

This occasionally sneaks into environmental analyses, such as the 2011 book The Great Disruption by Paul Gilding.  Billed as an "optimistic" view of the climate crisis--that is, that civilization will somehow get through it--it nevertheless contains this single astounding sentence:“I expect we’ll tragically lose a few billion people.”

He doesn't say much more about that, and nobody does.  But it does suggest more than Gilding's subtitle--"an end to shopping."  A few billion people--meaning what? More than two billion, I'd guess-- is a significant chunk of the 7.5 billion now living.  The most vulnerable first, probably, and heating is predicted to be worst in the poorest parts of the world, but epidemics and the fragility of our civilization's supply lines could change that calculus.  It's a horrible thought, and nobody wants to say it out loud.

But that doesn't mean people--ordinary people-- haven't thought it.  Generations of Americans were told and taught not to express fears about nuclear war, because those fears played into enemy hands, showed lack of confidence in our leaders, were unpatriotic.  (That's after officials stopped lying about how pleasant radiation poisoning is, and how you can protect yourself from a nuclear explosion by 'duck and cover.')

But those fears just dove deep into individual and societal unconscious, emerging in nightmares and neuroses, and got expressed and defused in popular entertainment--specifically the bug-eyed monster movies of the 1950s, that Susan Sontag had the insight to see were more than they seemed.

 Eventually after the atomic monsters brought the subject into the open, movies could be made about the real causes and effects of nuclear war,  from Fail-Safe and Doctor Strangelove, to the UK's The War Game, US televisions Threads, to two films that actually changed minds and galvanized public support to control nuclear weapons: the 1959 star-studded feature On the Beach, and the TV drama The Day After.

There are lots of reasons for the current plethora of dystopian fictions and movies, or the fashion for zombies on television as well as film and print.  But the unconscious fear of endtimes is an unacknowledged wellspring.  The climate crisis and other environmental catastrophes are part of that fear. Whether these indirect approaches eventually result in a more conscious approach that changes minds and policies remains to be seen.

It may be too late to prevent large-scale changes (and therefore personal changes affecting everyone) and hardships, but perhaps the worst may still be averted, and the times to come may better be faced by a more prepared generation.

Presidential Portrait

I've avoided even a single photo of our apprentice dictator since the election of November 2016.  Why feed the beast?  But since he's truly outdoing himself this week, it's time to show him as he really is.

Consider this also an illustration of that comforting story in the Washington Post, in which the effect on the careers of military officers in refusing to carry out an order for a nuclear strike is the rationale for carrying it out.  A dilemma for today's General Buck Turgidson.

 Because according to this story, essentially this is the one and only case in which one person-- the guy pictured above--can give an order and it will immediately be carried out.  He can order transgender people out of the military and nothing happens.  He can order an unhealthcare bill be passed and nothing happens.  He can order me to get him a sandwich and I guarantee you that nothing will happen.  But he can order thermonuclear war and within minutes it will begin.

But Of Course! Blame It On the '60s

Not that it matters all that much these days, but I haven't been so annoyed by such a wrongheaded and overreaching piece in a long time as by Kurt Andersen's opus in the Atlantic, "How America Lost Its Mind."

It's frustrating because the piece makes a case--an easy-to-make case--that the minds of some Americans are conspicuously untethered to reality, and that this has political consequences.  But his analysis why this is happening right now is either glibly nebulous and unconvincingly supported or just oversimplified to the point that it's simply wrong. The question of "How America Lost Its Mind" is therefore in reality unanswered.

It really goes off the rails when he attributes much of the phenomenon to that grand bugaboo of our time, the 1960s.  Of course!  Why be original when you can be popular? He tries to lend his thesis credence by noting that he was a child then.  Well, I was a young adult at the end of the decade, and I saw things a lot differently.

I don't deny that some of what we are seeing now constitute perversions of cultural phenomena of the 60s, but not only of the 60s or after. The '60s also did not invent ignorance and isolated cultural myths.  He does mention some of this history, but always we come back to the 60s.  In many ways the 60s are just a target of convenience, not to mention a right wing bugaboo popularized by Newt Gingrich in the early 90s, that still plays well in certain quarters today.

Nobody denies there were excesses in the 60s.  But there were reasons for those excesses.  What happened in the 60s relating to conventional wisdom didn't happen all on its own. Much of it was in reaction to the failures and limitations of the conventional wisdom, and the fact that these failures were causing real harm, from stultified and despairing lives, to dead Americans and Vietnamese.  As well as threatening the planet with the thermonuclear logic of the Cold War.

In fact the major critique made in the 1960s was: underneath this mask of rationality, America is already insane.  If America lost its mind, it was already gone by the premier of Doctor Strangelove.

Andersen writes that the 60s fostered crazy conspiracy theories, and anti-science attitudes.  He mixes politics and New Age assertions as the reasons.

But let's separate a few things.  First, conspiracy theories of any kind did not begin in the 1960s.  Nor did the belief in UFOs, etc.

Second, let's remember the political situation.  The critique against the Vietnam War was begun, not by ideologues or conspiracy theorists, but by scholars.  The teach-ins of the mid-60s showed how the conventional wisdom in Washington was wrong about history, geopolitics and warfare in Asia.  They also asserted a different set of values and moral calculations, but their point was: the conventional wisdom was wrong.

Later in the 60s it was asserted, documented and proven that in addition to being wrong, those in charge of the conventional wisdom about Vietnam were lying.  There was in fact a conspiracy to keep facts from the American people.

Also, among the "conspiracies" that protestors talked about were that anti-war groups were being infiltrated by government agents and government provocateurs, and that lots of people were being monitored for their anti-war activity.  All of that turned out to be true.  Just as the later conspiracy 1970s theory that there was an organized coverup of ongoing authoritarian crimes in the White House.

Or the 1950s conspiracy theory that there is a military-industrial complex that perpetuates a certain conventional wisdom in foreign and domestic policy.  I believe that was started by that noted nutcake conspiracy theorist, Dwight David Eisenhower.

Anderson apparently sees the roots of today's anti-science crowd in the New Age movement, tracing it all to the Esalen Institute.  And the justification for believing anything counter to science is the fault of the 60s philosophy: "Do your own thing, find your own reality, it’s all relative." 

Anderson appears to have no idea of the meaning of those phrases in their contexts.  Breaking out of the strictures of convention, not settling for mind-numbing, soul-destroying conventional careers, especially those that were actively destructive, and not being afraid to live creatively,  were the references.  "It's all relative" and reality as a construct were philosophical--and scientific-- statements about the nature of reality.

Yes, it was about questioning authority.  It was fundamentally about questioning authority.  Which science is supposed to do, but not only science.

The excesses of New Age thinking (which didn't get formalized by that name until the 70s) have been individually critiqued, often by prominent participants of the time.  But Esalen was also home to Gregory Bateson (author of Steps To An Ecology of Mind and Mind and Nature) and others who developed concepts crucial to systems thinking and cybernetics, as well as ecology.

Exploring relationships of mind and nature, science and spirituality, the individual and society, fact and value, and well as bravely exploring areas that may yet find a place in explaining reality, remain relevant.  As messy and goofy as some of those explorations may have been in the 60s.  (At least we had some fun.  Maybe that's behind all this.  We had too much fun.  Well, don't worry.  We also had a lot of pain.)

Some of those "unscientific" explorations are, fifty years later, accepted within the body of science. Esalen developed or introduced therapies that explored mind/body connections, and the application of nonwestern practices such as yoga, that are part of holistic medicine as practiced today, including by certified physicians who integrate it into their conventional medicine practice.

Even some of the apparent excesses Anderson "exposes," like R.D. Laing's approach to mental illness, were responses to the corruption of the conventional treatments of the day, yielding insights that today are themselves conventional.

Lynn Margulis, a hero of science who
questioned conventional evolutionary
science--and won.

And that's really the problem that pieces like this share with others that try to explain the origins of today's attitudes towards certain scientific findings.  They tend to be all or nothing, either/or.  Either you adhere to the conventional wisdom on evolution, say, or you must be an anti-science creationist.

Or in another common formula, you must accept all conventional conclusions--extremely well-founded ones based on years of results taking numerous approaches such as climate change--as well as others that are more narrow, and dubiously aligned with corporate interests--or you are anti-science.

  Or the big one: if you believe that science may not be up to explaining everything about reality, then you are an anti-science bigot.

There are people who are anti-science, at least in one area or another (they don't "believe" in evolution but accept medical science) and then there are people who don't believe in bad science.  The 60s revolted against inadequate narrowness in the conventional scientific wisdom of the day--and there is always very powerful conventional scientific wisdom.

Some of what people in the 60s came up with remains fringe if not disproven, but other ideas have become quite respectable.  It used to be believed that people couldn't intentionally change body states or brain activity.  Now the results of brain scans on Buddhist monks in deep meditation have proven they can.  Again, mind/body relationships are now part of medical practice.  Much of what today is called preventive medicine was dismissed by scientists back then.  Maybe even called pseudoscience and New Age anti-scientific drug-addled hippie nonsense.

Others aspects of Anderson's piece are equally maddening, as in the 60s elevation of fantasy (without the context of its cultural critique, and suggesting that it implied no operational difference between fantasy and reality) as the reason that fantasy movies and television are so prevalent, and so many people are deeply involved in those worlds.

Well, people have been deeply involved in fantasies, and at some level believed them to be true, for not just fifty years but thousands of years. The history of drama, from myths chanted around the winter fire to medieval mystery plays and so on, all suggest such involvement is hardly new.

 Story-telling is a human cultural expression and product, with all kinds of functions.  Quite a few cultural observers explore why fantasies are prevalent, and why particular fantasies are prevalent at a given time. It's an entertaining and at times enlightening game.  I play it myself.  But it requires a less blunt instrument than this piece brings to bear.

We might suggest, for example, one reason for the prevalence of fantasy stories might be the novelty of how they are told, especially the special effects and the relationship to gaming, social media and fandom.

Moreover, many of these fantasies inevitably explore reality through metaphor or character, as stories and especially myth always do, if only in the responses of some of their readers or audience.  They may be as much an escape from the noise of the moment into the nub of reality, or at least other possibilities, as an escape from reality itself.

Anderson makes other remarks about the 60s that also miss the mark.  He skeptically critiques The Greening of America (a 1970s best seller) as if what he has to say is a revisionist expose, when in fact that book was largely laughed at in media of the time, particularly in the alternative press.

 I hope that future writers looking for a cultural fall guy will restrain themselves from choosing the popular target of the 1960s.  But I'm not counting on it.

Library Days

The Greensburg Library on South Main St., as
it was when I started going there.

I was probably nine, maybe ten when I got my first library card.  It was a momentous act.  I doubt that I had ever read a complete book yet.  But apart from the stories in the Book House books, or in Boy's Life magazine, which I started getting by subscription when I joined a Cub Scouts den in fourth grade, the only place that had reading I might be interested in was the public library.

I remember talking it over with my mother, and she accompanied me to the library and they signed me up.  After that, I went to the library on my own--a few times with friends (especially after Saturday afternoon movies) but mostly on my own. It was the beginning of my life of independent reading.

It may be difficult for readers today to believe it, but I walked to town unsupervised before I was ten.  It was just under a mile, a straight shot down and up hills, down West Newton Road and across to continue as Pittsburgh Street, finally, steeply up to the business district on the crest of a hill.

The first public library in Greensburg opened in June 1936, ten years before I was born.  Before that, libraries were associated with schools but mostly the private property of wealthy families.  One such library was featured in the palatial home of Major William Stokes, a lawyer for the Pennsylvania Railroad, built in 1846 and situated on a high hill where the Seton Hill University campus is now.  (The building itself survived as St. Joseph's Academy, later renamed St. Mary's Hall. As the original building of the college, I believe at least part of it is still there.  It was visible from the window of my very first home on College Avenue.)

That library is intriguing because it may have inspired a young visitor to the house in 1852, a telegraph operator named Andrew Carnegie.  It was apparently the first library he'd seen and it impressed him.  Ironically perhaps, though Carnegie built some 1700 public libraries across America, there was never a Carnegie library in Greensburg.  He did offer to build one in 1896, but he always insisted that the host municipality pay for upkeep, and Greensburg demurred.

The first attempt at a public library quickly outgrew its space, and General Richard Coulter, who commanded troops in World War I and belonged to a prominent Greensburg family wealthy from banking and coal, donated his old home on South Main Street.  (Built in 1881, this may have also been the home of his father, the first Richard Coulter, who was a member of Congress and a state supreme court judge.) It opened as the Greensburg Public Library on June 26, 1940, almost precisely six years before my birth.

The building that housed the Greensburg Library

This is the building where I got that first library card, and which I frequented until I left for college.  On that first day I learned the terms: I could borrow as many as three books from the children's room (but only from there), for two weeks, with the opportunity to renew for another two weeks.  Fines for overdue books were on the order of a penny to three cents a day.

I was probably asked what kind of books I was interested in, and I mentioned science fiction, or at least spaceships.  I was steeped in Saturday morning shows like Space Patrol, Tom Corbett and Rocky Jones: Space Ranger, and even before that, I'd watched Captain Video every evening.  By then the exciting Man in Space episode of Tomorrowland on the Disneyland hour may have aired. I'd seen a few science fiction movies, and may have read a Robert Heinlein story in Boy's Life.

So I went home that day with The Space Ship Under the Apple Tree by Louis Slobodkin.  It looked like this, although I remember the cover as red.

So many times--up the steps, into the front door, with the circulation desk dead ahead.  A sharp left turn and down a few polished wooden steps to the children's room.  In a few years, I would be sneaking behind the bulletin board at the far right corner of the room, which hid the dimly lit adult stacks in the rooms next to it, books from ceiling to floor.

It was a bit spooky in there at first.  But by junior high years, having learned the rudiments of the Dewy Decimal System and how to use the card catalog, I searched and browsed back there.  I also checked the shelves of new books on the wall just opposite the circulation desk, to the left of the entrance. It was there I found The Politics of Hope by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in high school, and gravitated towards such collections of essays and occasional pieces all my life.  Another I remember from that year (1962) was Dwight Macdonald's Against the American Grain.

To the right of the entrance were a couple of smaller rooms, one of which was the reference library, with a big globe.  I remember reading chapters in the Catholic Encyclopedia in there on a high school evening, shocked by what some of the Popes had gotten up to.

The other room hosted periodicals, and I spent time there in high school, especially reading and copying quotes and information for my extemp speeches and debates at speech and debate tournaments at nearby schools.  Apart from the latest issues of magazines and newspapers, there were guides to periodical articles by subject, titled I believe Index to Periodical Literature--thinner stapled white pages covering a few months, thicker green-bound pages covering longer periods.  I also remember the periodical Vital Speeches, with selected new speeches, that I only ever saw in the library.  

In the early '60s I discovered that I was allowed to take the stairs to the second floor that began just behind and a little to the right of the circulation desk.  On the second floor was a room of recordings, and a record player.  Amazing!  Classical, jazz and most importantly just then, folk music albums.

Then I learned I could take some out.  Just about all I knew of folk music was what was on popular radio--mostly the Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul & Mary.  So it was the public library that introduced me to Odetta, Miriam Makeba, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan.

I also was introduced to recorded humor--the albums of the new comedians I saw on TV like Bob Newhart, but especially to the satiric Stan Freberg.  I loved those albums!  Freberg (among others) inspired me to write satirical scripts and record them with three friends (The Four Frauds) and later I learned songs and even stole funny bits from those folk albums, as three of us morphed into a folk group, the Crosscurrents.

The public library provided access to records I didn't know about and couldn't afford to buy anyway.  But it mostly put books into my hands--books I had no other way of even touching, let alone reading.

 Going to the library, selecting the books, were among my first independent acts. Being conscientious about getting the books back on time was among my first independent responsibilities...And of course I remember fondly several of the library ladies who were always there--friendly, sometimes scary, but who knew me and talked to me as a reader.

Several years after I'd left for college, in 1969, the library moved to a much bigger building, the massive old Post Office a block away on Pennsylvania Avenue.  The Post Office moved into a new and smaller building across the street.

This building, now called the Greensburg-Hempfield Area Library, itself has a complicated history I haven't entirely put together yet.  It opened in 1911--old enough to offer a prospect for watching one of the last Buffalo Bill Wild West Shows parade into town.

One Greensburg history says it was built according to the plan for the Charlotteville, Virginia post office (1905), and indeed they look all but identical.  (That's Greensburg above, Charlottesville left.)

That provenance may help account for the prominent columns and portico--though a popular style at the time (variously called colonial revival, neo-colonial and Beaux Arts) it especially echoes a lot of Charlottesville (and University of Virginia) buildings, which themselves echo Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's home outside that city.

The Greensburg building was expanded and extensively renovated in 1934-5, likely a New Deal project. When I was there last I was shown the place on the floor where the old building joined the new--it seemed about half and half. I was also shown the blueprints.  Samuel Plato may have been involved, the first African American to receive commissions to build US Post Office buildings. He was also a builder who insisted on integrated work forces.  (The Plato connection is according to the Filson Historical Society in Kentucky, which houses Plato's papers. I didn't see his name on the documentation I was shown at the library.) 

It's puzzling to me that Greensburg seems to ignore this building and its history, even though it seems to be within its official historic district. There might be a plaque commemorating the 1930s expansion--most New Deal projects had one--but what might exist is now covered by a wheelchair access walkway into the side of the building.

 The 30s and 40s were busy in Greensburg and Westmoreland County, so this was not just the post office but the county Federal Building, housing offices of the Agriculture Department, U.S. Navy, IRS, Civil Service Commission, Census Bureau and the congressional district office.

 When I returned to town for a couple of hitches in the 70s and 80s I dropped by the library in its new building.  The entrance area was huge, the circulation desk impressively big, and the ceilings very high.  The first time I visited there was even one of the same library ladies there.  I asked her if she remembered me.  "Yes," she said, not approving of my beard, however.  "You look like an old sailor."  I immediately thought of all the books I'd borrowed that featured ships and the sea.

At this point they were getting rid of old books and had them on sale in the lobby or just outside.  I bought my cherished two volume set of William Manchester's history of the 20th century, The Glory and the Dream, for twenty cents.  And a first edition of Wallace Stevens' first book of poems, for a dime.

A final anecdote suggests a different aspect of this story.  Sometime in the late 70s or early 80s I was suddenly inspired to look for a book I'd taken out in high school.  I found it in the stacks. It was obviously the very same copy (dark blue, gold lettering.)  The old card system was still being used, with a card in a pocket just inside the book to indicate the due date.  Often this card traveled with the book, and had its title and number on it, as well as the signature of the person borrowing, so you could actually see how many times it had been taken out, and by whom.  Homeland Security would have loved it.

As I took the book to the circulation desk, I glanced at the card.  The first and last time it had been taken out was 1963, and the first and last person to take it out was me.   The book was by Richard Hofstader: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.

It's a small town library, serving small town people.  But among those people is somebody like me; in fact, for those years, exactly me.  This book, clearly of minority interest, was here.  They bought it and kept it, and it waited for me.  The public library is open to all, but serves individuals within the all.  Even a minority of one.  And we all get to borrow these books, on the same easy terms.  The public library is a miracle.  It's the most democratic of institutions, and therefore, a democratic miracle.

As for the first book I borrowed, The Spaceship Under the Apple Tree, it's a somewhat witty tale that today would remind people of E.T.  But after my two weeks were up I took it back without completing it.  Reading a whole book is a skill, and in my case it took more time to acquire it.

I would soon find on those shelves just the books to really get me started.  But that's for next time.

The Resistance: Heart and Soles

Slate has an article describing the Instagram posts of Pete Sousza, President Obama's official photographer.  Of this parade of photos from the Obama years, the article accurately says:

"The timing of each upload is deliberate, designed to contrast the former POTUS’s grace and poise with the current one’s flailing malice. Souza’s Instagram, which now has about 1.5 million followers, feels like a magic mirror swimming with images from a brighter past."

However the writer, Katy Waldman, offers this to castigate it as more evidence of liberal laziness and self-regard.  Of course, if people did nothing more than live in this past, it's not going to make for a better future.  But these posts fulfill several legitimate functions.

When things are so awful that the Obama presidency seems like it couldn't have happened, it's important to know and remember that it did.  It's important to keep in heart and mind that politics and the presidency don't have to be mired in such intense darkness and shame.  There has to be a model.  Not just promises or a plan, but evidence that it can be real. Emotionally, spiritually as well as intellectually. ..So check out the article for the examples offered, or better yet, go to the source.

Meanwhile, Obama's legacy is precisely leading to action.  Politico profiles the organization once known as Obama for America, which reorganized itself as Organizing for Action, keeping the same identifying initials of OFA.

The article concludes that among organizations fighting in the Resistance, OFA is the best prepared and most skilled in political action as well as grassroots organizing, and training succeeding generations of organizers.  They meet people in their neighborhoods, churches and community functions, as well as through social media and email, in what used to be called shoe leather politics.

After organizing responses to Republican unhealthcare proposals, OFA is currently sending organizers to town hall meetings and district offices, taking to account those who voted for these proposals.  On the agenda for the near future: "It's already looking at plans to go into 2018 with a massive voter registration drive that could become its main project ahead of the midterms."

But OFA deals with more than election politics itself.  Organizing to spread true information on healthcare and the climate crisis are continuing efforts.

All of this as an independent organization with no formal relationship with President Obama, though things may change when he reemerges to focus on redistricting issues and gerrymandering.  Yet the relationship with his presidency endures:

"Yet six months into a presidency geared toward undermining the legacy of the man these young operatives still revere — more as someone who shaped not just their politics but their entire political consciousness — OFA has found new life. It’s become the lead organizing hub of the Trump resistance."

"Most of the opposition groups that have sprouted up since Trump won are election-oriented and inexperienced in coordination. OFA believes it now has the tools and know-how to keep the fight going when others will fade or stumble.

“Mobilizing in the moment,” Warner said, “is different from organizing in the long term.”  You gotta have heart, but you gotta apply those soles to the job as well.

Hiroshima and the Future

The Atomic Bomb dome, an historical monument (one of at least 60) in the now thriving city of Hiroshima, preserved in the condition it was after the explosion of the first atomic bomb used on a human population in wartime on August 6, 1945.  The Guardian has this nuanced article about Hiroshima today.  Meanwhile, the effort to ban nuclear weapons worldwide continues in the UN.  It seems about as hopeless as banning slavery once did.

When the Resistance Gets Real

Jonathan Chiat at New York has written about what others obviously have thought (and I at least have written about here): the prospect that a cornered apprentice dictator in the White House will attempt to save himself and impose his authoritarian will by starting some sort of war.

Chiat recounts the last few weeks in which the a.d. has become more and more isolated, attacked, stymied or at least ignored (which operationally amounts to the same thing) by members of his own party, of the federal government and the military, as well as by an openly skeptical media, including its automatic and relentless fact-checking.

He sees no way that this regime can save itself--except: "There is one frightening exception. Trump could regain public standing through the rally-round-the-flag effect that usually occurs following a domestic attack or at the outset of a war."

Although this has worked in the past, Chiat argues that it need not work this time.
Trump’s authoritarian tendencies make the prospect of his rebuilding his legitimacy on the basis of security especially dangerous. The number of Republicans who see Trump as a strong leader has dropped by 22 percentage points since January. Trump’s opportunity lies in exploiting fear to demonstrate strength.

"There is an answer to this danger. It is to not simply assume Trump can — or should be allowed to — use war or terrorism to his advantage."

"The ability of a president to gain popularity by launching (or suffering) an attack is not a law of nature. It reflects, in part, choices — by the opposition to withhold criticism and by the news media to accept the administration’s framing of the facts at face value. A chaotic, still-understaffed administration led by a novice commander-in-chief who has alienated American allies deserves no benefit of the doubt. Everything from Trump’s incompetent management of the Department of Energy, which safeguards nuclear materials, to the now-skeletal State Department, to his blustering international profile has exposed the country to an elevated risk of a mass tragedy. A long-term task of the opposition is to prevent the crumbling presidency from transmuting that weakness into strength."

In other words, if he tries it, this is when the Resistance earns its name: when it's hard and potentially dangerous, and not just a matter of waving banners at big block parties in the sun.

Mother of Exiles

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Emma Lazarus
The New Colossus

Trump Aide Dismisses Statue of Liberty 'Huddled Masses' Poem

It greeted millions of immigrants from Europe, including my mother and her parents.  Through all our hypocrisy, it has stood as our ideal, as the very meaning of America to billions of people around the world.  And is the latest to be defiled by this shameful regime in the White House.

Sam Shepard, John Heard

The most exciting evening I'd experienced  as an audience member of professional theatre to that time, and really never to be surpassed, was seeing Curse of the Starving Class at the Public Theatre in 1978, by a playwright unknown to me named Sam Shepard.

I walked into the Public Theatre in complete innocence.  At that time the Public was like a multiplex of live theatre, with as many as four plays on stage every night.  I chose Curse of the Starving Class partly because of the title, and mostly because there was a ticket available.

Apparently in the cast was Olympia Dukakis, Pamela Reed and Michael J. Pollard, but it was the writing that blew me away: the words.  They expanded my conception of what was possible at this level.  Either at intermission or after the play I bought a copy in the lobby of Angel City, Curse of the Starving Class & Other Plays by Shepard.

 Although I would later see another original production--Fool for Love ( with Will Paton the week after he took over the role from Ed Harris)--plus the PBS filming of the Steppenwolf production of True West, and a production somewhere of Buried Child, my main experience thereafter would be reading his works--other plays and play collections, and his prose pieces in Motel Chronicles.  All about the words.

Shepard was a downtown Manhattan star before he became a movie star, and his lore was everywhere there.  Wikipedia has him meeting Jessica Lang on the set of a movie, but legend of that time said he met her when she worked as a waitress at the hip downtown bar where he hung out.

Shepard influenced others, and helped establish a theatre of words for awhile (the most successful of which probably was David Rabe's Hurlyburly which made it to Broadway.)  This was much to my predilections as a writer, though I realized that I was not comfortable enough with violence to write quite like he did, nor as a consequence would I reach such deep places in an audience.  But those long arias of words, spoken in one play by an actor playing drums, were riveting.

I saw all his movies for awhile, including the one he directed, Far North.  Though his New York Times obit refers to his play A Lie of the Mind as "great," at the time reviewers called it disappointing, as I recall.  He seemed to fade into the firmament by the end of the 1980s, though he kept writing and acting.

Oddly then, it was only a couple of years ago that Fool For Love was first produced on Broadway.  I don't know when Shepard was diagnosed with ALS, a disease that varies a great deal in his symptoms and progress, but always ends the same, as it did for my father.  It's said that Shepard dealt with it with the same stoic dignity of his on-screen persona.

At the New Yorker, Patti Smith writes an intimate memorial. UK actor Stephen Rea provides an unexpected perspective. I had no intimate or even actual relationship, but he touched my life nevertheless, and that's as much as I can honestly write about him.  Sam Shepard died at age 73.

John Heard in a TV production of The
Scarlet Letter, made a few years after
Between the Lines.

Another near-contemporary died more suddenly in recent weeks--again it was someone I didn't know and never even met, but who had some relationship to my life, though in one case quite an odd one.

I'd been thinking a bit about the actor John Heard just days before I read of his death.  Specifically for his appearance with Liv Ulmann and Sam Waterston in the singular film Mindwalk.  But when I read his NY Times obituary I was reminded of a long forgotten 1977 film called Between the Lines.   It's survived in film lore for introducing an entire cast of young actors who became successful for decades (somewhat like the later The Big Chill), Heard being one of them.

The film was about an alternative newspaper in Boston, directed by Joan Silver.  The story was conceived by two friends of mine, David Helpern and Fred Barron, and pitched to Silver and her husband after the dinner we all attended at the Orson Welles Restaurant in Cambridge.  The script by Fred Barron, originally called Alternative Lives, was basically about the paper we had both written for, Boston After Dark/Boston Phoenix, with suggestions of the Cambridge Real Paper.

Recently I watched the movie for the first time in decades on YouTube.  It's not very good.  But John Heard's performance is the strongest.  The script was obviously rewritten several times by different hands, judging from its flabby incoherence, and little remains of the actual ambience or people at the Phoenix (though there seems to be some of Janet Maslin in one character, and her relationship with her then-husband Jon Landau.)

There is one action that I recall was based on something I did at the Phoenix, though it was performed (by Jeff Goldblum) in a different context: when he punched a hole in the plasterboard wall, he was engaged in a satirical context with a conceptual artist; when I did it, it was out of frustration.  But the one actor who looks the most like I did at the time was John Heard, though with a better haircut.  So it was eerie.

As were the circumstances of his death.  Heard, 72, was recovering from back surgery at Stanford University Hospital.  He died unexpectedly in a hotel room in Palo Alto, probably only blocks away from where I'd been staying a couple of weeks before.

Heard had a few leads in film but settled in as a character actor in film and on TV--IMDB has five or six projects yet to be released.  But he never got comfortable with how movies are made, he often said in interviews, and considered himself primarily a theatre actor. I'm sorry I never saw him onstage, since he clearly has the voice and presence for it.  I still admire him in Mindwalk, though that film certainly didn't get mentioned in media summaries.  But there are others who love it, just as there are rabid fans for his starring role in Cutter's Way.  These things live.

May they rest in peace.  Their work and their memory live on.