The Climate Candidate

Politico:

"No one has ever won a major statewide race, let alone a presidential nomination, with a single-issue, climate-focused candidacy. But Jay Inslee is about to try.

The Washington state governor launched a White House bid Friday that stands to have a significant effect on the electoral politics surrounding climate change.

For years, despite scientists’ warnings of the calamitous consequences of a warming world, climate change was relegated to a backwater in America’s political campaigns. Presidential candidates rarely mentioned the issue in debates or put money behind it in campaign ads. Even politicians supportive of policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions largely skirted the issue, convinced it resonated less with voters than health care, education or other concerns.

But while Inslee barely registers in presidential polls, the issue that the Washington governor is attempting to corner is showing new signs of traction with likely primary voters. The subtle shift — expressed in public opinion polls and in renewed focus on climate change in the Democratic-controlled House — is providing Inslee a small opening. And it is forcing other, higher-profile Democratic presidential contenders to address climate change more explicitly than in any previous presidential campaign."

Gov. Jay Inslee announcing his candiacy for the Democratic
Presidential nomination on Friday

“It’s a very different environment now than we’ve seen in well over a decade,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. For liberal Democrats, he said, climate change “is a top-tier issue, and that is the base of the Democratic Party.”

This article also reveals that former California governor Jerry Brown intends to speak out on climate change as an issue in an effort to get Democratic candidates to make it a priority:

"Will the presidential candidates just concentrate on other stuff?” he asked. “Trump and race and gender and single-payer and inequality — those are all issues that are worthy of discussing. But climate change is going to make all of them worse. So, I will do what I can to get it on the agenda. It kind of boggles my mind that it’s getting the rather minimal treatment that it’s getting."

Amen to that.

You Make My Dreams

The 80s.  Cable TV was the new big thing and with it, MTV: all music videos all the time.  One of the first acts to make MTV their home was Hall & Oates, and their first big hit of the MTV era was this one, "You Make My Dreams Come True."  The video is an early no-frills effort, but it pops with high spirits and musical energy, and suggests the best of being young in the 80s.  Daryl Hall's t-shirt with a suit coat would become a hot style with Don Johnson and  Miami Vice, and it has never quite left since.  The video also has an improvised, antic, even goofy quality that would soon be replaced by ever-elaborate mini-movies and formalized dance moves in MTV's heyday decade.

I liked this song a lot at the time, as I did their earlier "Rich Girl" (think I had one or two in mind when I heard it) and their  remake of the Righteous Brothers "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling," which got to be unusual in that John Oates had the lead vocal.  But those were about all of their songs I remember, so I was surprised to read that Hall & Oates sold the most records of any duo in the rock era.  That would include the Everly Brothers and Simon & Garfunkel (before Paul Simon went solo.)  Whatever.  They were valid musicians, and Hall in particular continues in different venues to this day.  Enjoy this one--a bit of infectious fun from a weird decade.

Fear of Climate

David Wallace-Wells' new book, The Uninhabitable Earth, has been getting more attention than most books on the climate crisis.  He presents the latest conclusions from the latest research, which is especially dire considering the sobering fact that things have gotten much worse in the past 25 years, when the climate crisis was a known phenomenon:

"It’s also the revelation that we’ve done more damage to the environment since the United Nations established its climate change framework in 1992 than we did in all the millennia that preceded it," one writer noted. "Or, as Wallace-Wells puts it, “We have now done more damage to the environment knowingly than we ever managed in ignorance.”

One of his conclusions about the near future is precisely what I've been saying here in recent years: “The 21st century will be dominated by climate change in the same way that … the 19th century in the West was dominated by modernity or industry...There won’t be an area of human life that is untouched by it.”

There are signs that the pace of this becoming true is picking up, apart from all the severe weather and accompanying disasters which are still mostly confronted with benumbed and willful ignorance. This January, as both newly elected and reelected or incumbent US governors gave their inaugural or state of the state speeches, at least five used the occasion to strongly endorse major action to address the causes of global heating.  They included the governors of New York, Pennsylvania, Maine, New Mexico and Colorado.  California is already on the books in this regard.

The change to a Democratic administration in Michigan immediately resulted in that state withdrawing from lawsuits against the EPA seeking to challenge its efforts to reduce greenhouse gas pollution. “Under my watch, Michigan will not be a party to lawsuits that challenge the reasonable regulations aimed at curbing climate change and protecting against exposure to mercury and other toxic substances,” said [new attorney general] Nessel in a statement.

But the big national event was the unveiling of the congressional Green New Deal proposal, which several Democratic candidates for President immediately endorsed.  This comprehensive proposal got some immediate good press.  Its premise in terms of the scope of action was endorsed as accurate by climate scientists. A Green New Deal can give us the freedoms to allow humanity to flourish was the headline to a Guardian opinion piece.

Wallace-Wells admitted it was flawed but praised it as a first and urged Democrats to get behind it: "But even in this larval stage, it’s clear that the Green New Deal is an enormous leap forward — fundamentally, even categorically, more serious than the previous approaches to address the unprecedented threat to human civilization as we now know it."

The Atlantic hailed the coming of "the Millennial era of climate politics," particularly in the person of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, already known on the Internet as AOC, as a chief proponent of the Green New Deal.  As she put it: "Climate change and our environmental challenges are one of the biggest existential threats to our way of life, not just as a nation, but as a world...“In order for us to combat that threat, we must be as ambitious and innovative as possible." 

But once AOC's popularity began to sink in, along with poll numbers showing overwhelming bipartisan support for Green New Deal proposals, and a public somewhat willing to pay taxes to support these proposals, plus the decline in popularity for climate crisis-denying lawmakers, the complex of unsavory forces that comprise the Republican opposition machine began to amp up.

 AOC was quickly demonized, and attacks on Democrats began, characterizing them and such proposals as the Green New Deal as "socialist" and radical. Pundits began to worry whether Democratic candidates were too far "left" rather than whether their proposed solutions adequately address problems. Under this barrage, press turned negative, and the impression that the Green New Deal "rollout" was "botched," and that this somehow tainted or discredited the proposals became conventional wisdom.

Considerable backlash from the current administration and especially the deliberately distracting elements of election year politics--especially the debate over emotional but meaningless abstractions that nobody can define (like "socialism")-- mean that the efforts to address the problems of climate crisis causes and consequences are still likely to be much less than they need to be.

There are also the perennial debates on messaging, on how to talk about the climate crisis in an effective way.  Some say doom and gloom only paralyzes people, while Wallace-Wells thinks that realistic fear is the needed motivator. (His media book tour interviews appear here and here  , reviewed here and here   and a book excerpt here and here.)

Politico highlighted a "change" in semantics emerging principally from weather people:"leading climate scientists and meteorologists are banking on a new strategy for talking about climate change: Take the politics out of it.

That means avoiding the phrase “climate change,” so loaded with partisan connotations as it is. Stop talking about who or what is most responsible. And focus instead on what is happening and how unusual it is—and what it is costing communities."

This tactic isn't new--it's been used at the community level before.  Its danger is a complete concentration on the effects over addressing the causes.  You can't address the causes of the climate crisis without acknowledging those causes: greenhouse gases.  Yet it is almost surprising that this approach hasn't taken over.

 As the effects become more dire and widespread, that is still likely to happen unless people wake up to that danger, with the result of  never-ending and always accelerating efforts to deal with the effects (and the consequences of those effects), while the causes remain unaddressed--and doom the planet to even worse heating in the future.

We most often know the story of something only when it is over, and can look back at events as if the causes and effects were always obvious.  So we don't know the complete story of our civilization's response to the climate crisis.  While "Too little, too late" now seems the likely story, we are in the middle of the events, with lots of information but some that's missing.  Being in the middle of events, we can only do our best, and enact hope by so doing.

When You're Only Lonely

John David Souther was a jazz man, playing sax and drums in Texas.  But he had his ears open to other Texans, especially the sounds of Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison.  When he wound up in Los Angeles, he literally picked up a guitar left at his house by a musician friend, and found a new musical expression.  He began hanging out at the fabled Troubadour club (and the Sad Cafe next door) and made some interesting friends among young and aspiring musicians, including Jackson Browne, James Taylor, Don Henley and the other eventual members of the Eagles, and especially Linda Ronstadt, with whom he had a romantic and musical relationship.  Together they all created the dominant LA sound of the 70s.

Souther became a songwriter for them all, sometimes singing on their records.  He made his own albums for a smaller public, which included me.  I practically memorized his Black Rose album in particular.  But it wasn't until 1979 that he had a breakout hit with this song, "You're Only Lonely."  With obvious and admitted inspiration from Roy Orbison, there's some Buddy Holly in it as well, especially live.  Souther's voice is different from Orbison's but also remarkable, and he seems to sing with such ease.

This is about the only piece of video of Souther singing this song I could find--a live performance outdoors at the Farm Aid concert in 1986.  There's some sound problems, a few microphone squeals, but the song gains in performance what it loses in sound quality.  (There's another YouTube video of the same performance that replaces the audio with the 1979 studio recording, but it doesn't really work.  The tempo is slightly different, and it comes off a bit lifeless.)  This to me is a fitting companion to the song that inspired it, Roy Orbison's "Only the Lonely."

The Chain of Extinction

"Save the Whales" became the most successful environmental campaign, when the Blue Whale, humpback whales and other whale species were threatened with imminent extinction.  The polar bear has likewise become the icon of the climate crisis.  It still faces likely extinction.

The Earth is undergoing what scientists consider the sixth mass extinction in the planet's known lifetime.  Normally, just one amphibian species goes extinct every thousand years.  Now it may be as many as 45,000.  And extinction rates among "many other groups" (writes Elizabeth Kolbert in her 2014 book The Sixth Extinction) "are approaching amphibian levels."

There are different contributing reasons for various groups and species, though humans are most often the final cause.  The climate crisis is the greatest overall threat but there are many others.

As human civilization cuts itself off from daily contact with the rest of life, all this goes on almost invisibly.  So one question is, which of the potentially iconic animals (or plants) will go extinct first, and shake some sense into us (for however long it last)?  The great apes?  Tigers?  Polar bears?

There's a new candidate now, which suggests an ominous problem for the near future.  That species is the Monarch butterfly.  The annual count in California, where the western Monarchs winter, was down 86% from the previous year.  This represents a 99.4 percent decline since the 1980s, and an all-time low for the Pacific Coast.  The population is below 1% of what it once was.

The more numerous Eastern Monarchs that winter in Mexico, also showed more than a 90% drop since 1996.  There used to be billions of them.

The Western Monarchs wintering in Marin County were estimated at some 10 million butterflies.  The population is now less than 1% of what it was. Scientists suggest that once it drops below 30,000 butterflies, the species is headed for certain extinction.  It is very close.

If it occurs, the Monarch extinction will be due to particular circumstances that are part of a general trend: pesticides, loss and fragmentation of habitat, and effects of global heating.  Butterflies are among sensitive species and sites that are specifically threatened by the proposed Wall on the southern US border.

 And new studies show the butterflies are not alone.  A much-ignored February headline:Insect numbers are collapsing around the world, which could cause the "catastrophic collapse of nature's ecosystems" and threaten "the survival of mankind".

"More than 40 percent of insect species are declining - and the rate of extinction is about eight times faster than that affecting birds, mammals and reptiles. Based on current trends, insects could be extinct within a century.

Insects make up two-thirds of all life on earth by number. They pollinate plants, enrich our soil, and provide food for larger animals in the food chain. Their loss would be devastating to both agriculture and the environment."

Or as Edward O. Wilson succinctly put it, these are "the little things that run the world."

This analysis of data collected in 27 studies fingers the usual suspects: habitat destruction, pesticides and the climate crisis.  In both habitat destruction and pesticides, the prominent culprit is industrial agriculture.

A member of the European Parliament's agriculture committee succinctly explains why this continues:

"What might accurately be dubbed insectageddon is being driven by the agrichemicals industry. This situation is compounded by compliant politicians and policymakers who fall prey to lobbying pressure and then refuse to implement science-driven policy to protect wildlife. This has meant that over the past five decades conventional farmers have forgotten the natural systems they once relied on to control pests. Non-organic agricultural systems are highly dependent on chemicals, so feeding a vicious circle."

This is no longer a matter of family farmers spraying a harmful pesticide.  It is saturation on industrial scale.  In his 2012 book Apocalyptic Planet, Craig Childs describes exploring an industrial cornfield in Iowa where he saw no living thing other than corn.  This method kills pests but also life forms that replenish the soil.  Soon not even corn will grow here.

The growth of GMO agriculture is part of this death spiral.  A serious mistake is made when scientists and others lump together anti-GMO advocates with climate crisis deniers as examples of "anti-science" superstition.  The safety of genetically modified food is only part of the issue.  Most of the damage is being done by the intensive use of pesticides on GMO crops, and the spread of genetically modified seeds.  It may not be anti-agrichemical-sponsored science.  But it is the science of life.

The loss of an iconic species is felt emotionally.  Some ordinary beauty leaves the world.  I remember a childhood in which butterflies of all kinds and colors were plentiful in my back yard, including Monarchs and Monarch look-alikes.  Now here on the North Coast we feel fortunate to see one large butterfly for a day or two each year.  That's not a scientific comparison, but it suggests the loss we feel.

But it's more than what we feel.  It's what we eat.  It's what we are, whether we choose to see it or not.  It's the world that sustains our species.  And we're destroying it, while obsessing on real but comparatively much less important news.

The Voice

"Only the Lonely" is the quintessential Roy Orbison.  Reportedly the first song and recording to be made with Orbison's particular (and spectacular) voice in mind in 1960, it became the template for the Orbison sound.  His subsequent parade of classic hits took him into the late 60s, but his career went into a long eclipse in the 1970s.

 However, there was a second act in this American life.  His songs appeared in a few movies in the early 1980s, and he was rediscovered through his classic hits.  And suddenly there he still was--fully able to perform those hits, with that same unique and awesome voice.

In 1988 he was working on a new album produced by Jeff Lynne of the Electric Light Orchestra.  Lynne was also producing George Harrison.  In the early 60s, Orbison and the Beatles had toured together in England.  Harrison got together an ad hoc band to write and record a song for the B-side of a single, and Orbison agreed to join up.  The band became the Traveling Wilburys, the resulting album became a smash, and Orbison was making new hits again.  His Lynne-produced solo album came out soon after, which included his first top ten hit in decades.  He was reportedly having a great time, agog at both the respect younger musicians and big stars were giving him, and the concert crowds.  He was in the midst of this ecstatic period when he died of heart failure in December 1988.

Just before the Traveling Wilburys happened, a concert by and for Orbison fans called "The Black and White Night" was created, and is the source of this video.  It consisted of Orbison singing his songs, with instrumental and vocal backing by some of the biggest stars of the day. Fellow Texan J.D. Souther did the vocal arrangements.  Among the backup singers are Souther, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt and K.D. Laing.  Elvis Costello and Bruce Springsteen are among the instrumentalists.

What I especially like about this cut is the responsiveness of the crowd to Orbison's voice.  He seems to respond to them in turn by going higher on some of the high notes than he did on the original record.  With the tasty string section, it's a goosebumper all the way.

In my opinion it's about time for a remix of this concert--even on the CD, the background vocals are too faint.  Otherwise it's a great concert, and this is one of several songs available on YouTube.

The Disillusionist

The President of the United States has punishing responsibilities which require vast and detailed knowledge, historical perspective, an openness to expertise and the intelligence to quickly grasp complex information, as well as empathy, attentiveness to duties, statesmanship, personal charm and above all, persistent hard work.

The President cannot lie consistently and get away with it.  Don't be insane!

The President--or members of his family that he has appointed to official positions-- cannot engage in obvious corruption, using the office for personal gain, without immediate consequences.

The President must keep in mind the whole people of the US, and the leadership role of the U.S. in the world.

The President must keep in mind the future of the country and the world in every policy and decision.

The President must obey the Constitution and the principles of the separation of powers, in spirit as well as to the letter of the law.

And of course, the President of the United States cannot even appear to be beholden to a foreign power, particularly an adversary, let alone show favor to that adversary's interests while acting contrary to American interests.

But the current occupant of the White House has disillusioned most of the country and the world on all these beliefs, and more.  He continues to do so every day, and yet the next day, he's still there.

Gone are the illusions that well-established standards and norms that have lasted centuries cannot be violated with impunity.  So far there have been really no consequences, except to everyone around him, his party, our system of government, the country, the world and the future, which is rapidly slipping away.

Take the matter of lies.  His lies are quickly and regularly enumerated, but they are frequently so outrageous that calling him on them seems itself ridiculous.  He lies on facts, he lies about history, he lies about what he says people tell him, and he lies about himself.   He does not ever admit that his lies are lies, or that established facts are true if they contradict him.

Then there are the needless lies, the obvious exaggerations.  He can't respond to the suggestion that he doesn't work very much except by claiming he works harder than any other President ever has.

Lying that leads to more lies is a well known pattern.  Most people in the world no longer believe him, which seems a natural consequence.  "In the end deceivers deceive only themselves," Gandhi said.  But Gandhi would be disillusioned on that score, too.  Some people will "believe" what helps them politically (looking at you, Graham, and other Republicans) but above all, they will believe what they want to believe.

And that's the source of perhaps our greatest disillusions.  This occupant of the White House has empowered the bold expressions of racism and hate that may have seemed all but buried in the past.  He has empowered belief in what is manifestly not true, and actions predicated on those beliefs.

But is he deceiving himself?  Not every salesperson believes what they claim.  Still, even if he believes only some of his lies, he certainly believes that it is to his advantage to tell them.

Which leads us to another source of disillusion: the belief that the country would not permit the President of the United States to be crazy and remain in office.

The question of his mental health frequently recurs, in major papers like the Washington Post and New York Times, and recently in the new online version of a conservative publication that bit the dust, called the Bulwark. In it, Tim Miller asserts that this president is "hallucinating."

 C.G. Jung answered questions from a Texas psychologist in a series of interviews towards the end of his career in 1957.  Mostly he talked about his work, but he made one statement for a larger audience.  Obviously referring to the thermonuclear weapons threat, he said, "Nowadays particularly, the world hangs on a thin thread."  That thread, he said, is the human psyche.  A Soviet leader or an American President could plunge much of the world into instant hell.  "What if something goes wrong with [their] psyche?"

" And so it is demonstrated to us in our days what the power of psyche is, how important it is to know something about it," he said. "But we know nothing about it! Nobody would give credit to the idea that the psychical processes of the ordinary man had any importance whatever."

It is just as true today.  As a society, we know next to nothing about the psyche. The debate over the mental or psychological fitness of this man with his finger on the button is itself enough to demonstrate that this is so.  Our terms and discussion are utterly impoverished, and partly as a consequence, our country is powerless to deal with a President that may be crazy.  If any of us had previously believed otherwise, this controversy is another cause of disillusion.

Can we really say this man is hallucinating?  First of all, there's evidence that he's not making up all his own lies.  He has people to do that for him.  They tell him lies and he repeats them.

Within his own psyche he may find his embellishments.  For example, his persistent and lurid descriptions of women being taken across the border bound and gagged.  That's happened in movies and TV shows, so it could be a Reagan moment.  But it's also an image with a long history in so-called men's adventure pulp magazines.

George Orwell took note of this as early as the 1940s.  Villains were always foreigners--either enemies of the day like the Nazis or "Castro's Communists," or almost any foreigner from a British or American point of view.  The lurid magazine covers and stories inside traded on sadistic treatment of scantily clad women.  In some cases, Orwell points out, the magazine editor pretends there is a solemn purpose to exposing such atrocities, and uses them "as a plea for tightening up restrictions on immigrants."    

Craziness is its own subject.  Regardless of the degree of belief, lying is enormously destructive.  Ursula K. Le Guin quotes Socrates: "The misuse of language induces evil in the soul."  "Lying is the misuse of language," she points out, and notes that the reverse of Socrates' warning is also true: lies breed lies and confusion.  Evil in the soul induces lying.

Lying induces evil in the nation's soul.  And the evil in the nation induces lying.

As for crazy, it is possible of course to be crazy and not evil.  But in the combination of crazy and evil, it is evil that trumps.

The Voyage is the Return

I checked the Arts and Letters Daily compilation on Saturday, as I do periodically. I clicked on an article in the Humanities magazine on Ursula K. Le Guin, since I've been reading her essays, speeches and reviews in her last collection, Words Are My Matter, and I've just acquired a copy of her translations of the Tao Te Ching.  I've already written about buying and reading her blog-inspired collection, No Time To Spare, last Christmas, shortly before she died, and a book of late interviews, Conversations On Writing this Christmas.

This isn't new for me--I've been reading her nonfiction since I came across her 1979 selection, The Language of Night (edited by Susan Wood.)  What is new is that last month I had a personal breakthrough in reading her fiction.  I'd admired her opus Always Coming Home, and recognized it as a special and very important work.  I knew that earlier novels were also special and important in their time, and generally.  But for some reason(s) or for none, I couldn't really get into her novels.  I'd start them and then stop.

This didn't stop me from admiring her achievements, and learning from her nonfiction.  I knew that someday I would be reading her fiction.  I remember seeing the PBS dramatization of The Lathe of Heaven decades ago.  In the 1990s, before we even thought of coming out here to live, Margaret and I were in Portland for a week.  It was just before Christmas, and the Portland bookstores were hosting readings by local prominent writers.  One of them was Ursula Le Guin.  I made a point of getting us there, because Margaret had read many of her books.  So (after introducing myself) I got to introduce Ursula to Margaret as the author of a play being produced by Portland Opera that coming weekend, one writer to another.

Recently Margaret chose The Lathe of Heaven for her book group to read.  I took a look at it, and another of Margaret's copies of early paperbacks that I knew by its title, The Word For World  Is Forest.  I picked that one out, and began reading...  And kept on reading.

A book (or an author) and a reader have to be ready for each other.  And at last, I was in sync with the fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin. I went on quickly to The Left Hand of Darkness and the novel that utterly amazed me, The Dispossessed.  I'll be moving on back to The Lathe of Heaven soon, and especially to Always Coming Home.

In any case, it was pure happenstance--I happened to check the Arts and Letters Daily site for the first time in weeks, happened to see the article on Le Guin, and made it my first click.  It's the cover story in the magazine (published by the National Endowment of the Arts)--and what a cover: a stunning portrait of the young Ursula K. (That's it up top.)  Le Guin is eminently quotable, and this piece has some good ones, including this, which can also be found in context in The Language of the Night:

When she received the National Book Award for children’s literature in 1973, she said much the same, urging the audience not to underestimate the truth-telling potential of imaginative literature. Fantasy writers, she told them, can speak seriously “about human life as it is lived, and as it might be lived, and as it ought to be lived. . . . It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.”

The occasion for this Humanities article is a new documentary film on Le Guin that the Endowment partly sponsored: Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, directed by Arwen Curry.  It looks destined for public television, but at the moment appears to be making the festival circuit, with some special screenings here and there.

So I got on the Internet, found the movie's site, and where the movie is showing.  It was showing in one place: Arcata, California, where I just happen to live.

I know destiny when I see it, so Margaret and I went to this film on Sunday evening at the Miniplex, a comfortable (and separate) screening room that's part of Richard's Goat, a cocktail bar, which seems to be a currently fashionable kind of venue for millennials particularly.  The film was in the early evening.  There would be music later.

In addition to scenes with Le Guin herself over a ten year period (and selections from her famous six minute speech at the 2014 National Book Foundation), there were on-screen comments by Neil Gaiman, Margaret Atwood, Michael Chabon and others.  There were several moving moments in this interesting, intelligent, visually inventive film.  It was well-attended--a nice mix of ages in the audience, mostly couples.

For me, the film was particularly informative in tracing the development of Le Guin's Earthsea series, about which I knew little.  There was more emphasis on the feminist issues and aspects than the environmental issues in her work, with some reference to her utopian themes (Kim Stanley Robinson would have been a good voice here) but provided valuable background to her particular contribution of an anthropological approach to science fiction.

Anyway, I'm glad we went, and if you are in Arcata, the next show is tonight.  It will be here for the rest of February.  Here's the schedule.

History of My Reading: Living Paradox

In early 1965--the second half of the 1964-5 school year--Frederick Delano Newman was approaching 30, and in his third year as a professor of philosophy at Knox College.  Born in the Bronx, he worked as an apprentice machinist and in other jobs after his father died and left the family destitute.  At 18 or 19 he joined the U.S. Army and served in Korea just after the Korean war officially ceased.  Thanks to the G.I. Bill, he graduated from the City College of New York, which (according to its web site) was known as "Harvard of the Proletariat" and "the poor man's Harvard" because of its "academic excellence and status as a working-class school."

Newman got his PhD from Stanford University, the self-styled Ivy League college of the West, just before he began teaching at Knox, which at the time liked to call itself the Harvard of the Midwest (complete with Harvard's purple and gold.)

At Knox he was friends with Douglas Wilson and William V. Spanos of the English Department (among others), and so I probably knew of him from Wilson (my academic advisor) in my first semester.  Newman and Wilson were principals in a folk music ensemble, famous that year for their satirical song about "the rug," which--if memory serves-- told the story of Knox buying the world's largest carpet and building a Fine Arts Center around it.  The CFA had just opened.

But I'm pretty sure my first direct experience of Fred Newman was in the intro philosophy course (Philosophy 115) I took that second semester.  I probably knew that--like my fiction-writing course with Harold Grutzmacher--it would be my last chance to take one of his courses, because it was to be his last semester at Knox.  But I'm not entirely sure about the timing, since Newman himself was not told until January that his contract wasn't going to be renewed after this semester (so late in the year that it was itself a violation of rules established by the American Association of University Professors.)

A disturbing number of young and favorite faculty members were leaving Knox that year, as others had the year before and more would the year after. Newman's abrupt and mostly forced departure was the most dramatic example of the Knox brain drain, and that drama played out all semester, culminating in a Student Senate resolution and a protest march at graduation.

But while this drama slowly built to its climax, my ongoing and intensive experience was this philosophy course, the first I'd taken.  It was not, we were emphatically warned, about a "philosophy of life," or even the Great Thoughts and schools of philosophy through history.  Newman had studied analytic philosophy with the charismatic Donald Davidson at Stanford. Its general areas of interest were logic and language (which happens to be the title of what I believe was one of our texts: Logic and Language, an anthology of essays by the likes of Gilbert Ryle, John Wisdom and G.E. Moore.)  Logic and language also happened to be areas of my intense interest and aptitude.

As I was to learn later, this brand of analytic philosophy emerged from Oxbridge--the universities of Oxford and Cambridge in England-- beginning in the early twentieth century.  One emphasis among several was dubbed Ordinary Language Philosophy, which questioned academic reliance on specialized or technical terms (especially jargon) and instead analyzed the meaning of words and expressions in everyday use, and their relationship to philosophical questions.

A.J. Ayer

(There was also a reductionist version of analytic philosophy called Logical Positivism, championed by Oxford's A.J. Ayer.  It was the subject of many a debate at Knox and elsewhere before collapsing under its own weight.  Playwright Tom Stoppard mentioned in his Paris Review interview that he'd seen Ayer on television responding to the question of what were the main defects of logical positivism.  "I suppose its main defect," Ayer said, "was that it wasn't true." Nevertheless, it still managed to rise from the dead in various late 20th century movements.)

Beyond the Fringe: Oxbridge Quartet

This analytic/ordinary language philosophy was so ingrained in those English universities that it became a basis for the characteristic humor of an age, first through the Oxbridge quartet (Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett) who devised and performed Beyond the Fringe in the early 1960s (most directly in the sketches called "Oxbridge Philosophy" and "Portrait from Memory" which was about Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore.)

That style of language and logic play also inspired the likes of David Frost (That Was the Week That Was),  the members of Monty Python's Flying Circus, and Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)--most of them Oxbridgers.  It also influenced the work of several English playwrights--notably Tom Stoppard, who wrote a play about academic philosophers (Jumpers), and Michael Frayn, who wrote a long book of philosophy, which I reviewed for the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review.

This is not to imply that this philosophy course was a joke (though Quine's writing and Newman's talk could be playful and witty.)  On the contrary, it was among the richest, most consequential and most intellectually mind-opening courses I took at Knox.

I remember the class as being huge.  I believe we met for lectures in the Fine Art Center, perhaps the main theatre or the music theatre.  The lectures were supplemented by tutorials, with either Newman or the only other member of the philosophy department, Donald Milton. Perhaps Milton lectured as well, but Newman was definitely the main attraction, a mesmerizing and theatrical performer.

I'm not sure what books we were required to buy for this course, if any, but I'm sure of several books that were central to the course (we may have been given handouts from various chapters):  Mind and the World Order: Outline of A Theory of Knowledge by C. I. Lewis (a book originally published in 1929) and Word and Object by Willard Van Orman Quine, a contemporary Harvard philosopher.  If I didn't acquire those books during the course, I did shortly afterward.  We also intensively studied at least one essay ("Two Dogmas of Empiricism") from Quine's essay collection, From a Logical Point of View.

We were definitely given handouts, including texts of Newman's lectures (double-spaced mimeographed purple ink copies.)  I also have a long article by Warner A. Wick from the Philosophical Review that looks like it came from this course.  We wrote frequent short papers, some perhaps based on articles like this, which were the subject of our tutorials.

The tutorials were held in the philosophy office where Newman and Milton would hold them simultaneously in different parts of the room. Each would be sitting in one chair, with an chair for the student opposite. We filed through, one after another. It reminded me of two priests hearing confessions, except we didn't kneel.

Philosophy 115 was not a standard introductory course that presented a range of material, organized by historical chronology or types, which students were expected to learn to identify.  We were introduced instead to philosophy as an activity.  We were dropped in the middle of philosophical undertakings--into what seemed like live discoveries and debates.  We weren't learning about philosophy; we were learning to do philosophy.

Along the way there were new ideas and a new language, and our heads were swimming among the given and interpretive, analytic and synthetic, a priori and empirical, not to mention relativistic ontological relativism.  But we learned most of the terms and ideas on the fly, inside the analyses being done. This was an electric combination.

The books and essays we read were making actual arguments to advance knowledge, as were Newman's lectures, or at least some of them.  As students we were focused on Newman's preoccupations and his brand of philosophy (which I realize now in paging through two of his subsequent books, Explanation By Description and The Myth of Psychology, had American roots in the pragmatism of William James as well as certain Oxbridge figures.)  But a semester is not a long time, and this approach to an introduction seems as least as valid as the more standard one.

 In one sense it could be said that instead of learning the history of swimming and the various methods, we were thrown into the pool to learn how to swim. More than that, I felt it as a model completely new to me: a course in which students witness and share in the ongoing work of the teacher in their field.  What could be more exciting than that?

That impression was augmented by Newman's availability.  He was on campus a lot, in the Gizmo even at night, and although discussions could be wide-ranging (and funny), the kind of analytical approach we were learning in the course was always present, if not predominant.  (For some reason I recall one specific day when Newman sat in the Gizmo with his back against the heat register or radiator.  He talked for hours, even though he had a cold.  Then he got up, declared that he'd sweated out the cold and felt better, and left.)

What were we learning? Especially what transferred beyond the discipline into other areas of knowledge and life?  Of course that varied for each student.  But at this remove, two areas occur to me as prominently in the mix for many.

 First of all, to question, beyond what we may already have learned to question.  Not just the accuracy of facts, the legitimacy of sources, the faulty arguments (by authority, for example) or illogic.  But the meaning of every statement, every word--its logic and implications.  Philosophy analyzed the internal logic--the hidden assumptions, the unquestioned contradictions--of entire fields of endeavor, such as science (including social science.)  It wasn't a stretch to ask similar questions about politics or literary studies, or relationships.

Second, the defining role of the mind in our reality.  In effect, this philosophical approach stated that the world as we know it is as much a product of the mind as the mind is of the world.  In a meaningful way, we are the medium in which the apprehensible and comprehensible universe exits; our abstractions, analogies and stories construct a universe.  We couldn't exist without the given world, but the world we knew couldn't exist without our mental participation.  This is a paradox, and the paradox is us.

This single insight of the mind's active relationship to reality becomes crucial to approaching such disparate subjects as quantum physics, the Tao and Zen meditation, modern literature (Wallace Stevens, for instance), Vietnam and Yellow Submarine ("It's all in the mind, ya know.")

G.E. Moore

It's a heady moment when the stability of the world is shattered, and you can no longer see yourself as simply a receiver or observer of it.  The first temptation is to go immediately to the extreme.  There is a philosophy student rite of passage when you're convinced by the argument that you can't prove anything actually exists outside of your mind.  Fred Newman said that G.E. Moore's argument for the existence of physical objects was to wave his big meaty fist in your face, and ask if you wanted to test its reality.

The philosophy we studied--of Quine and Lewis particularly, but with roots in Kant etc.--posits a given world, but humans define it in the most basic and subtle ways.  Moreover, we don't often do this individually.  Reality and its elements are a product of social agreement.

This is the subject of the one paragraph of Quine I've always remembered.  He points out that calling an object "red" is a product of learning and agreement--we don't really know that everybody sees exactly the same color, and that indeed there are differences in the light that create slightly different colors, but we still call it red.  Here's the paragraph (from the first chapter of Word and Object):

"Different persons growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants.  The anatomical details of twigs and branches will fulfill the elephantine form differently from bush to bush, but the overall results are alike."   

There was a certain shared euphoria among students in this course.  I remember a long conversation with an older student named Barbara Johnson about the course that was exhilarating (and not just because she was.)  This course fulfilled dreams of what college could be.

And the college was about to take it away.

Paul Shepard

The year before, Knox lost pioneer ecologist Paul Shepard; if there are future historians, they will recognize him as one of the geniuses of the 20th century. Jerome Schiller also left. He was hired a year before Newman, and together with him, began to built an academic philosophy department where none had been before.

At the end of the 1964-5 school year, Gabriel Jackson, widely viewed as a brilliant historian and teacher, was leaving.  Student Patricia Perry wrote: "Dr. Jackson is a tremendous human being, enormously talented, interested in almost everything, with a reverence for life.  He is a first-rate scholar with a concern for the humanities, for social justice, for rational and compassionate solutions to human problems.  In his classes, one gets the impression of his true concern for problems that matter."

Writing professor Harold Grutzmacher was leaving, depleting the writing faculty by half. Also leaving was Rowland K. Chase, chair of the theatre department, who not only directed a stellar production of Hamlet this school year, but wrote a lecture/ essay about his approach to the production published in Dialogue--the only such occasion in my time at Knox.  Kim Chase had also revolutionized the Studio Theatre program to be more student-oriented, and revitalized theatre at Knox in the process.

Some 18 faculty members were not coming back in the fall.  There is always some turnover, and people have individual reasons for moving on that students of my generation were probably not equipped to understand, such as career advancement, money to raise a family, escape from Galesburg, family preferences and relationships, for example.

But some faculty exits had troubling factors in common, having to do with the college's uneven commitment to academic excellence, and conflict with the administration over policies, especially over the onerous student codes (chiefly women's "hours" or curfew, but other issues as well) that were becoming serious causes of campus conflict.  Most troubling was the quality of several of the teachers who were leaving.  Having experienced excellent teaching, Knox students were not happy about losing these opportunities.  Many felt betrayed.

A charismatic teacher like Fred Newman would probably have been the focal point of student anger anyway, but the nature of his situation ensured it.  Unlike the others leaving (who weren't on one year contracts), he had been fired--in a brutal way, halfway through the school year.  Knox avoided national censure by offering him a one year terminal contract, which he refused.

The reasons for his firing were the sources of rumors all semester.  In April, the editor of the Knox Student, Ed Rust, interviewed Newman, and got his version.  Newman talked about the achievements of the philosophy department in a sudden array of classes and--for the first time--philosophy majors, but also disappointments and difficulties of a two-person philosophy department--requests to expand it were denied.

Then he talked about the reasons he thought he was fired.  Newman was part of a group of young faculty members who worked within established channels to increase institutional opportunities for student participation in college decisions, and especially to modify women's hours, with the aim of eliminating them with a simple sign-out system for juniors and seniors.

That seemed close to success the previous spring (of 1963-64), he said, but a sudden reversal of the Student Affairs Committee vote led to alarm that the administration was closing the door on considering changes.  Classes were over for the year, but students still on campus wanted to talk about this, and discuss active responses, including a demonstration at the last remaining event of the year, graduation.  One of those meetings was held at Newman's home.

According to Newman, the college president (Sharvey Umbeck) accused Newman of leading or instigating this putative revolt, using a figure of speech I hadn't heard since a particular nun employed it in my fifth grade: "heads will roll."  (Newman said he had opposed a demonstration at graduation, and in the end students didn't demonstrate anyway.)

Rust's interview ended with the information that the other philosophy teacher, Donald Milton, was offered a contract to stay at Knox but declined.  Also that the one philosophy teacher Knox had hired to replace them had changed his mind and wasn't coming.  As of April, Knox had philosophy majors and philosophy students, but no philosophy department for the following school year.

Rumors again circulated--spread by at least one administrator I heard them from--that there was more to Newman's dismissal: something so dark and sinister that it couldn't be specified. Meanwhile,  the senior class "by a substantial margin" selected Fred Newman as their Senior Convocation speaker.

In May, a resolution crafted by an ad hoc student committee passed the Student Senate 26.5 votes to 4.  The resolution asserted that "a valuable member of the Knox faculty has been dismissed for reasons other than his academic competence.  Specifically, he is being dismissed for taking a position with respect to the social structure of Knox College, a position differing with the official administration policy."  The resolution called a dismissal on such grounds "irresponsible" and "a threat to the intellectual welfare of the entire student body."

It ended with this: "We, the students of Knox College, will express our concern on Friday, May 21, 1965."  That was the date of the Senior Convocation.  The demonstration the administration apparently feared the previous spring was happening one year later.

The last Knox Student of the school year, also dated May 21, contained Ed Rust's editorial, stating that while claims were made that Newman was lying about why he was fired, no one offered contrary evidence.  There was a long essay by student Gordon Benkler and several pages of letters to the editor, many in support of Newman as well as other departing faculty, especially Gabe Jackson.

Probably the most significant letter was from Jackson himself.  He countered the charges that Newman's interview was "full of lies."  There were "omissions, a few errors of detail, and some distortions of motive which understandably hurt a great many peoples' feelings--my own included.  However, the interview is, on the whole, highly factual..."

Jackson's letter ended with two sentences that would reverberate for years to come:  "I do not know the extent to which the administration and trustees are determined to create a great liberal arts college at Knox.  I do feel that I know that a truly excellent faculty and excellent student body cannot be maintained within the present codes."

This issue of the Student also contained the text of Newman's speech to the Senior Convocation, entitled "Rules and Games."  It was reprinted a year later in Dialogue. Reading it today, it remains well-cadenced, eloquent, heartfelt and insightful.  It is personal and at the same time creates a thoughtful context for the 1960s but also for our densely computerized age.

It continued themes of our course as well as a theme of the year for me--the defense of individualism.  Individualists, he said, are aware that in "acting in accordance with existing norms" they are choosing to endorse these norms, and are "sensitive to the fact that these norms are, in part, a result" of their choices.  Norms or rules cannot become moral crutches.

"Individualism needs defending," he said.  People can "dehumanize" themselves.

Aspects of the address are also very interesting in light of Newman's own later career.  At the time, with its evocations of Wittgenstein, it continued and--for those of us who were his students--completed our course in philosophy.

I don't remember much about the actual demonstration that spring.  In memory I thought it happened after the graduation ceremony.  I seem to recall being in Seymour Union to get my picket sign, waiting for it to start.  I remember it as being silent--a long line, single and double file--more of a funeral procession than a raucous demo.  Or maybe that's what I felt--that it was a funeral for my Knox College hopes, for the possibilities I saw in the course I'd just experienced, that seemed to be taken away in the next instant.

Effects of this philosophy course and the events of that spring--personally and at Knox more generally-- continued into the next year. I intend to pick up the story in a future post.

 As for Fred Newman, by that late spring I'd established something like a personal relationship with him. He volunteered to drive me and my boxes and suitcases of stuff to the Q train station to send home for the summer, in exchange for my babysitting for an evening so that he and his wife could go to what amounted to a farewell party.

We exchanged a few letters (though none survive), and I saw him occasionally over the next three years. He seemed to come back to Galesburg at about this time every spring, including 1968, when the last students who'd had him as a teacher were about to leave.  It was perhaps the year before that he arrived a little later, when Galesburg was already gripped in its solid block of summer heat. Probably my last memory of him was outside the apartment where I was staying on West Berrien.  He'd been in a mood, almost hostile at times, alternating with gloom.  I saw him sitting on the hood of a car, looking into the sunset.

CCNY today

After Knox, Newman taught at his alma mater, the City College of New York.  There was some talk of Antioch, but he wound up at Case Western Reserve in Ohio.  His official biography says that he was forced out of his positions at both schools when he insisted on giving his male students As, to ensure they kept their 2-S deferments from the draft and weren't shipped off to Vietnam.

Once when he returned to Galesburg he was promoting his new idea, an independent program called the Robin Hood Relearning Corps.  He also mentioned a summer experiment, in which he and three other philosophers and their spouses lived in the same house, so they could do philosophy full time.  The only result, he said, was that all four marriages broke up, including his own.

By the 1970s he was out of academia, and those two anecdotes suggest directions his life would take.  I remember him once cursing psychologists as "failed physicists," an offhand remark that continued to seem apt in many ways.  Just as his philosophical mentors claimed that reality is socially obtained, he decided that psychology required a social practice.  He and others developed a new kind of therapy, at least partially based on some of the theories that got attention in the late 60s, such as the work of R.D. Laing in the UK.  He became a therapist, with highly controversial methods.  Some of his work on personal and social development was with underclass black and Latino youth.

Newman also became a player in New York politics (he ran for Mayor at least once), and a playwright with his own theatre.  I have no personal knowledge of any of this, so I'll just quote his New York Times obituary:

"Fred Newman’s influential role in New York life and politics defied easy description. He founded a Marxist-Leninist party, fostered a sexually charged brand of psychotherapy, wrote controversial plays about race and managed the presidential campaign of Lenora Fulani, who was both the first woman and the first black candidate to get on the ballot in all 50 states.

He helped the Rev. Al Sharpton get on his feet as a public figure and gave Michael R. Bloomberg the support of his Independence Party in three mayoral elections, arguably providing Mr. Bloomberg’s margin of victory in 2001 and 2009.

He created an empire of nonprofit and for-profit enterprises, including arts groups and a public relations firm. He wrote books on psychology and philosophy as well as plays. One play, about the 1991 riots between blacks and Jews in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, was condemned as anti-Semitic by the Anti-Defamation League.

His greatest impact came through mobilizing his followers, sometimes called “Newmanites,” to build alliances with third parties, including that of the Texas independent H. Ross Perot."

When I heard about his death after a long illness at the age of 76 in 2011, I looked up this dizzying information: he's got a wikipedia page as well as his own website and material on the East Side Institute site.  He's got his own Vimeo page and C-Span page of videos.  I can't comment on the insights he had on psychology and politics, or dramaturgy for that matter, since I haven't really perused them.  But I did see that he continued to have enthusiastic followers whichever way he turned.

I began to see Newman not as a phony or a charlatan, as he has been called over the years, but as a charismatic personality, and as much a captive of it as others were captivated.

I've known other people since with similar traits: that brilliance that focuses with complete belief, together with an insistent persuasion and cultivation of complicity--until they drop it and pick up something else with the same conviction.

This is not necessarily bad but can be dangerous.  Generosity is accompanied by a need for the emotional connivance of others, and at worst there is a blindness to consequences and disparagement of non-believers.

The first effect of that charismatic energy, to quote a multi-year student of Fred's, was a kind of ecstasy: "I fell completely under his spell."  But also: "Fred left quite a trail of victims, and quite a trail of followers."  This former student detached himself from Newman's orbit when he began to see destructive consequences, long after he left Knox.  In similar circumstances, others apparently either overlook or rationalize such consequences, or believe they are not primarily consequences of what the charismatic figure said or did. Or they remain so convinced or just overwhelmed by the brilliance and the vision that nothing else matters as much.

  His complexities, it seems to me, don't require condemnation, just wariness.  Specific actions or ideas can be evaluated on their own. The charismatic personality is hard to resist but can become stifling as well as exhausting, so sometimes--or maybe inevitably-- you eventually just have to move on.  But the words are still there to be read and considered.

The Newman I knew introduced me to Quine and Wittgenstein, and to seeing the world in a different way.  In "Rules and Games" he quoted Wittgenstein about what games had in common--don't think or assume you know, but really look.  Newman also said of his speech that he wished he'd been asked "to hear for you rather than talk to you."  Those two statements remained guides for me and my work from then until now.

The 1965 Fred Newman ended his Senior Convocation Address by returning to Wittgenstein, and his last words: "Tell them I've had a wonderful life."

"Even those who never understood were to be thanked for allowing him to rant and rave and to be his individualistic brilliant self," Newman said.  "I am surely no Wittgenstein and I do not believe I am about to die.  But I feel compelled to conclude by saying to all my friends who have understood as well as to those who gave me the opportunity to persuade, 'Thank you.'"