CCCs New and Old

 A contemporary version of the New Deal’s first big program, the Civil Conservation Corps, is said to be a popular idea—according to one poll, it is extremely popular, and actually favored by more Republican (84%) than Democratic (78%) voters.

  At least half a dozen bills by members of both parties have been introduced in the past year or so in Congress.  The Biden administration is developing a Civilian Climate Corps, and proposes it as part of its infrastructure package, now being negotiated.

 But there seems to be a big range in what each of these proposals envisions that Corps members might do.  Some seem to concentrate on getting young people started in careers addressing the causes of the climate emergency.  Others see an employment program for all ages, engaging in traditional conservation efforts, though with the intent of preventing damaging effects of a deformed climate. Some add proactive programs in sustainable and non-toxic agriculture and clean technologies. Some also see a role in directly responding to disastrous effects, such as floods and wildfires. 

 Stories about these proposals compare and contrast versions of the new CCC with the old one, but incomplete or inaccurate understanding of the original Civil Conservation Corps isn’t helpful in figuring out how to organize a new CCC, or what tasks it could perform.

 The new CCC, most proposals agree, will not discriminate on the basis of sex, race or age, unlike the old one. It will pay a living wage, unlike the old one. It will work in urban areas as well as the woods, unlike the old one.  And unlike the old one, it could respond to climate-related emergencies.

 None of those assertions about the old CCC is entirely true.  Starting out with equity is an appropriate standard for a new CCC, but the old one wasn’t completely exclusionary. While the original CCC membership was overwhelmingly young, male and White, some older men were included, and there were separate camps for Black men and separate programs for women, which followed the pattern of everything else at the time, including the armed forces.  (The later and larger Works Progress Administration, providing employment in public works, was even more inclusive.) 

CCC camp at Glacier National Park

Speaking of the armed forces...The original CCC was FDR’s first New Deal initiative. Though there were small state and civic prototypes, the federal government had never tried something like this.  It appears to have been FDR’s own idea.  It sped through Congress shortly after his Inauguration in 1933.  Though it gradually built up its numbers, it still involved a lot of men all at once.  So although the program itself was run by the U.S. Labor Department, the camps were organized and run by the U.S. Army.

 The Army had the equipment and the experience—and the motivation.  Even in 1933 the possibility of war was known, and unemployed young men in the Depression were often both undereducated and underfed.  The CCC provided both food and instruction, and taught these men how to live and work together. 

 The level of wages provided to CCC members resulted partly from concerns expressed by employers (not too high) and labor unions (not too low), an issue that’s bound to recur.  In any case, the program provided food, clothing, lodging and medical care for free, so most of members’ wages were (by design) sent back to their families, where they were sorely needed.

 The CCC did a lot of work in the woods, it is true.  But they also worked in rural farming areas (soil conservations and irrigation, for example), and in and around small towns and cities (building roads and bridges in public areas.)  The nature of that work will in many cases be different, and should be more coordinated with local communities.  But the old CCC did prove that such a corps is flexible in what it can do and where.  It also showed that good relations between the CCC and local communities is possible, because it turned out to be normal.

 Similarly, the old CCC showed that it had the skills and flexibility to respond quickly to local emergencies, including large ones.  In 1938, a monster hurricane unexpectedly hit Long Island and New England with historic force.  The first storm wave was so violent that it registered on a seismograph in Alaska.  The wind and waters changed the coastline of Long Island Sound.  The storm and subsequent flooding over days killed upwards of 700, and destroyed tens of thousands of homes and other buildings, causing damage in the hundreds of millions.

 The damage was so extensive, over such a large area, that resources were inadequate, including the Coast Guard and the Red Cross.  FDR sent in members of the CCC as well as personnel employed by the Works Progress Administration—more than 100,000 in total-- to do everything from sandbagging rivers, clearing downed trees and searching wreckage for survivors to rebuilding roads and river banks, and feeding and clothing survivors (including clothes made in WPA sewing rooms in several states.)

 This was not the first time that the WPA and the CCC had responded to disasters, such as wildfires and major floods in 1936 and 1937.  They were “the shock troops of disaster,” as described by a newsreel of the time.  Since it was made by the WPA itself, it is propaganda of a kind, but it is factual. 

 Today this major disaster from 1938 is almost completely forgotten, as is this response.  But that response suggests that this kind of climate disaster effort is entirely possible for a new CCC, because it had already been accomplished by the old one.

The Perfume/Of Flowers

 The perfume

 of flowers! A haw

 drops such odour

 it stops me

 in the wall

 of its fall. Love

 arrests 

Lime-trees 

saturate

 the night. We walk

 in it 

On a path jonquils

 fill

 the air. Love

 is a scent

—Charles Olson 

 Charles Olson was an American poet whose theories, writings and teachings influenced generations of artists, beginning with his tenure running the legendary Black Mountain College in the 1950s. Before that, he worked with languages and in government and politics supporting President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was offered the Cabinet post of Postmaster General in FDR’s last administration, but turned it down, and turned back to literature. He’d started out in school with a thesis on Herman Melville, resulting in his first book, Call Me Ismael. 

 Olson’s influence was most direct in the work of Robert Creeley, but he maintained lengthy correspondence with a number of other poets including Michael McClure. His opus is the American epic The Maximus Poems, often compared to Pound’s Cantos.

 In fact there are many poets whose best work is in long poems and sequences, so not appropriate for this space. I’ve occasionally used pieces of such poems here, and maybe I should more often, but there’s a fine line between selecting and wrecking someone else’s work.

Your Daily Lear

 

--words and image by Edward Lear

Woking is now a suburb of London.  But in the 19th century when it was a separate village or town, it was the birthplace and childhood home of H.G. Wells.  

A Walk

A Walk

 My eyes already touch the sunny hill, 

going far ahead of the road I have begun.

 So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;

 it has its inner light, even from a distance— 

 and changes us, even if we do not reach it,

 into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are;

 a gesture waves us on, answering our own wave...

 but what we feel is the wind in our faces. 

 Rainer Maria Rilke

 translated by Robert Bly

History of My Reading: Intro To Berkeley

I was dropped off in Berkeley in late summer 1969 on College Avenue at a house shared by a Knox College grad I will call JB. (Even at this remove, it’s hard to know how people feel about themselves in the 1960s.)  I had friends from Knox in the Bay Area, but JB was more a friend of Joni’s, and she had arranged that we would stay there (or “crash” there as we’d say) upon our arrival.  But it was only me. 

 JB shared the house with a young man, maybe a bit older, who was either a medical student or intern or both, and a very attractive young woman who worked in a Berkeley clothing shop.  I was given a space behind the couch in the living room for my sleeping bag, and a fairly definite limit on my stay.  

 I believe it was on the very day of my arrival that two other former or maybe current Knox students showed up, fraternity brothers perhaps, to take JB on a drive up to Napa wine country.  She couldn’t go but they accepted me, and I found myself in the back seat of an open sports car, cruising up the highway, awash in the California sun.  We stopped at a wine tasting or two, they bought a few bottles and on the way back stopped at a roadside stand for fruit, bread and cheese, making it a kind of Mediterranean adventure.  Within a few hours, I was back in Berkeley. 

 I met up with a few Knox friends in Berkeley, including Mike Hamrin and Mary Jacobson, but had no prospects for another place to stay when my welcome period expired.  I tried a night outside in my sleeping bag, but turned out to be a hopeless hobo, because by morning I had a definite head cold.  I got my spot back behind the couch until I recovered.  It was probably then that I read the first book in Berkeley I remember, which had little to do with Berkeley but more with the happenstance of being on the road, and the guest in someone else’s house.  In fact, I can’t guarantee it happened there, but by process of elimination, it probably did.

 In any case I remember the book very clearly, and the happenstance.  I saw a paperback book in the living room, perhaps on a mantle piece, with an intriguing title and cover.  It was Tiger! Tiger! by Alfred Bester, a science fiction author whose name or work I didn’t know.  What I found was a British edition, complete with the UK price (4/6.) This novel was published later in the US with the title The Stars My Destination. 

 I read it through, intrigued by the science fiction ideas, propelled by the plot.  Apart from some of Kurt Vonnegut, I hadn’t read actual science fiction in a long time.  I didn’t do much more than open even the best-sellers and hippie favorites like Dune and Stranger in A Strange Land.  But this book got me interested again. I was especially taken with the concept of “jaunting,” which was a latent ability to transport oneself by the power of thought that it turned out everybody has.

 Alfred Bester has since become a revered name in sci-fi, especially for this novel and the one that preceded it, The Demolished Man.  He is now considered an inspiration for both the New Wave and cyberpunk science fiction writers. He himself had a love-hate relationship with science fiction, and spent most of his career in other forms.  Bester wrote for comic books, especially Superman (something of a family business as his mother had played Lois Lane on radio), as well as radio, television and magazines, especially the travel magazine Holiday, where he was an editor. I’ve more recently acquired a selection of his sci-fi stories and essays, with a few articles and profiles, notably of authors Robert Heinlein and Issac Asimov, titled Redemolished. 

 Re-read today, The Stars My Destination seems a different book.  I was probably impressed by the villain being the autocratic head of a huge corporation, but that’s become more frequent in fiction as in life. Though basically a riff on The Count of Monte Christo, the extreme pulp fiction characters and the throwback attitudes towards both women and men tend to detract, but the forward momentum of the story remains.

 I probably read it through my stuffed head, until one evening the medical student/doctor prescribed a heavy dosage of beer, and took me to a bar.  He was right. I was better the next day.  Meanwhile, Mike Hamrin had moved into a house at Shattuck and Ashby in Berkeley with several others, and invited me to join them. 

The house at 3011 Shattuck as I remember it was a white wood frame building with a back porch entrance at the end of a set of wooden stairs. It was a plainer version of many older houses in the Bay Area, where wood had been plentiful and more practical in terms of earthquakes.  This likely was the second floor (the house there now is a large two level), with the first floor occupied separately, and it may even have been a duplex, but all I recall is the rooms and the people living where I did.

  Inside the back door to the right was the kitchen, and to the left a small living room.  They were separated for most of their lengths by a wall.  Off the kitchen towards the porch was a small unfurnished room, which may have been a pantry or even a servant’s quarters in the house’s heyday.  Past the kitchen was a hallway and several rooms and bathroom.  

 Four people were living there when I arrived.  David and Priscilla were a couple.  Mike had a girlfriend who visited but had her own place.  The fourth was a young man I’ll call Phil because he was from Philadelphia. He may well have been the named tenant.

 It was a varied group.  Phil was Jewish, I had a Catholic background and the others a Protestant, if any.  David was a California Indian.  Today I’d guess Yurok, though his hometown was not that far north, so maybe not.  I don’t recall if Priscilla was from New England, but there was something mythic about her alliance with David.  Despite these differences, which we rarely if ever discussed, we were united by age, general attitude, the times and the place.  And of course we all smoked dope (to varying degrees) and were therefore “heads,” as opposed to “straights,” which in those days referred to anyone who wasn’t a head.

 David has acquired a small yellow school bus, and reconfigured the inside to accommodate gear and the possibility of living in it.  We made a number of road trips in that bus, mostly along the coast.

 On one trip we were pulled over by a Highway Patrol.  We were told it was illegal for the bus to look like a school bus, and we were therefore instructed to paint it.  Which we happily did, in a somewhat haphazard psychedelic style.

We might be accompanied on these trips by others who stayed at the house for awhile.  These might be day trips or longer, when we slept in the bus. On one such trip we wound up late at night at Drake’s Beach in the Point Reyes Seashore in Marin County, and had a ghostly visitor’s center all to ourselves.  It was a kind of chalet, with restrooms and huge vending machines that glowed in the night. 

 These longer outings might include hiking and taking an ocean dip, impressing upon me how frigid the waters are in this part of California even on a warm day.  And as a result of one such adventure, I was surprised and very impressed by another California feature: poison oak.  I’d had poison ivy several times “back East” and had some immunity, but not to the unknown poison oak.  I got a bad case. 

 We consulted a hippie elder who advised rubbing wet baking soda over my entire body.  So I spent several days isolated in that little room off the kitchen, lying on my sleeping bag, naked and covered with clumps of wet and slowly drying baking soda.  (Nudity was fairly common in this house.  Priscilla often stirred the morning oatmeal still naked. Seeing naked bodies doing normal things became ordinary with surprising speed.)

 The persistent itching as well as the flaking baking soda made my hours of reading in that room particularly memorable.  I got small bottles of the cheapest California white wine (which was still pretty decent) and whatever comfort junk food the little wine store near us sold.  There were books in the house, only some of which had a known origin.  One was a volume of Hemingway short stories, probably the Scribner collection.  I read it to the end, accompanied by white wine and Oreos.  This is a definite Berkeley memory.  (I finally hobbled off to the Free Clinic and got some topical medicine, and either it worked right away or my affliction had just about run its course, or most likely both.)

 I made some other trips more or less on my own. I went into San Francisco (usually hitch-hiking), including a few times to meet up with Ric Newman from Knox.  The first time, I saw him in the San Francisco production of Hair.  When we met in the lobby afterwards he was enthusiastic about the prospects for What’s Happening, Baby Jesus?, the play I wrote and directed our senior year, in which he played the lead role.  He thought Hair had made it a hot property.  I was unconvinced.

 I’d been in San Francisco just once before this trip, so I saw some of the sights this time, like Fisherman’s Wharf, and made my pilgrimage to North Beach and the City Lights Bookstore, known throughout the world as the center of the beat literature revolution.  I bought a kind of pamphlet book by Alan Watts, just 25 pages, titled Beat Zen Square Zen and Zen.  I was interested in Watts and Zen but since it was published by City Lights Books I mostly bought it as a kind of souvenir.  It was all I could afford.

 One day on the UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza I ran into someone I’d known slightly at Knox.  He was a few classes behind me, and was scouting California campuses, perhaps to transfer or for grad school. Eventually I accompanied him on a hitchhiking tour of  several other coastal colleges, including UC Santa Cruz, and ending up at San Jose State, where we were the overnight guests of English professor Richard Alexander, who’d left Knox to teach there. He fed us the most substantial meal I’d had in awhile.

 But I spent considerable time over the next few months in Berkeley itself, particularly on the UC Berkeley campus and along the now fabled Telegraph Avenue.

  I had arrived in Berkeley in late summer 1969 at an uncharacteristic moment: it was quiet.  Both the university and the city had been in near constant turmoil since even before the Free Speech Movement in the mid-1960s.  That turmoil had reached a new height just a few months before I got there, with the events that culminated in death and military occupation enforcing a kind of police state. It was the battle of People’s Park.

 The University had acquired through eminent domain a large property near the campus and within the residential and business community near Telegraph Avenue.  In 1967 they bulldozed the buildings on the site but left it empty.  It became an eyesore, a repository for abandoned cars.  Nothing much happened until early April 1969 when a group of local merchants and residents met to figure out what to do about it. Then everything happened, very fast.

 At this meeting, a student activist presented a plan to make the space a public park, and the attendees approved.  An article appeared in the Berkeley Barb, a local/ underground newspaper, and a hundred people, including a landscape architect, showed up to begin building People’s Park.  Eventually a thousand people participated, either working on it or contributing plants and money.

 The university then suddenly announced it had immediate plans for the site: a university sports field.  The chancellor met with park activists, and promised not to do anything to the site without notifying them.  A week later he ceded a quarter of the property to the park builders, and repeated the pledge. A week after that, that pledge was broken.  He announced the beginning of construction.

 

On May 15, Governor Ronald Reagan sent the Highway Patrol and university police to tear out the plantings for the park and erect a fence.  Demonstrations began immediately, spilling from the university’s Sproul Plaza—made famous by the Free Speech Movement—to the adjacent Telegraph Ave.  The crowd of several hundred headed to the site. The police used tear gas and called in reinforcements as the angry demonstrators became a formidable 6,000. 

 Members of some sheriff’s departments carried shotguns, and in pursuing vaguely violent protestors, fired in their direction.  Instead they hit innocent bystanders, killing a man watching from a bookstore roof on Telegraph Ave, and permanently blinding another.  Hundreds of protesters and some law enforcement were injured, some seriously. 

 That night Governor Reagan sent in nearly 3,000 National Guard troops, who acted as an army of occupation for the next two weeks, liberally using tear gas to prevent anyone from planting anything, and breaking up groups of four or more on the streets.

 The turmoil increased, more people became involved, the university partly shut down, and demonstrations continued.  On May 20, National Guard helicopters dispersed tear gas over the Berkeley campus, which spread through the city of Berkeley.  School children miles away were taken to hospitals for treatment. 

After that the unapologetic Reagan government backed off somewhat, withdrawing all but 200 troops, who nevertheless continued to prevent four or more people from talking to each other.  There was a peaceful protest march on May 30. 

 By the time I arrived in August, there was a silent stalemate.  When I first saw the site, I noted that it was one-third dry earth and a few plants, one-third sod being drowned by implacable water sprinklers, and one-third asphalt, where a solitary police sat on a bench guarding it.  Some people drifted through.  A helicopter suddenly flew over, startling me.  But nobody else reacted.

  Meanwhile, there was such internal pressure from Berkeley faculty and a majority of students that the university was at an impasse. Eventually people drifted back to treating it as a park (which is what it is today, with both good and bad effects.)

 But already in August it seemed that Berkeley as a place had moved on. Most students were gone for the summer, and what was left was Berkeley’s ongoing experiment in how a counterculture might function.

 Not that Berkeley gave up politics.  In the few months I was there, I heard activists Bernadette Dohrn, Angela Davis and Tom Hayden each speak on separate occasions and circumstances on the UC Berkeley campus.  

I took notes on Hayden’s talk in a large classroom where he was introduced by sociologist Edgar Z. Friedenberg, author of a book I’d so admired in high school, The Vanishing Adolescent, and of the more recent Coming of Age in America.  This was just before Hayden went on trial as a member of the Chicago 8, charged by the Nixon Justice Department with inciting violence at the Democratic Convention in 1968. 

 Whatever his positions or his image later, Hayden sounded very militant to me on that day.  He foresaw a long revolution in America of perhaps 20 years, with periods of violence and periods of peace.  When the revolution is successful, the worst counter-revolutionists, such as racists, would be confined in their own ghettos.  “The enemy is not in your head,” I heard him say.  “The enemy exists and must be dealt with.”

 In terms of a broader cultural revolution, though he had no kind words for hippies, he approved the form being developed by people in Berkeley, of “collectives,” small groups of people who live their politics but may specialize in a particular activity, like medicine, to support the community now but also be equipped to take over after the revolution.  “If you have any faith in the future,” you have to plan for after the revolution,” he said. 

One such collective in Berkeley, said someone in the audience, was teaching itself first aid and self- defense, for future confrontations. There had been quite a few antiwar demonstrations down Telegraph Avenue, and a lot of injuries inflicted by police.  But there were other institutions responding to the day-to-day needs of what might loosely be described as the counterculture.  There was the Free Clinic staffed by volunteer doctors, and a similar organization for legal aid.  There were efforts to feed people and distribute free food.

 There was also informal support.  The food co-op—basically a supermarket—did not prevent scavengers from carting away overripe vegetables and fruits that were discarded.  Some restaurants fed people out the back door, and I witnessed individual waitresses placing food left behind where “street people” could reach it. 

 What was the counterculture?  Political opposition was a major catalyst—from opposition to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee at UC Berkeley in the late 50s and early 60s, student issues, to the ongoing and growing opposition to Vietnam and the draft.  In the face of overwhelming disapproval by their elders, this alone created a sense of separation and fostered a subculture within especially the younger generation. 

 It was also a more general rejection or at least questioning of prevailing societal values, expressed at one end by the 1967 film The Graduate (part of which takes place in Berkeley) and at the other by the hippies, the political radicals, and their hybrid, the Yippies.

  But at its heart, the counterculture was about an alternative search for meaning.   Questioning the value system of the dominant consumer society (“Work, Study, Get Ahead, Kill” was an antiwar march chant), questioning the basis for current social mores, for attitudes towards the body and the soul, were catalysts for explorations of self, society and reality itself, by means of experience and imagination that were encouraged and enabled by the “mind-expanding” substances of cannabis and the psychedelics, but by no means limited to them. Music and other people were major psychedelics in the counterculture.  And sometimes, even books.

 Inevitably it led to spiritual quests and, as I saw in Berkeley, more formal forays into psychologies.  That aspect jumped out at me immediately upon my arrival. But more on all that next time, plus the bookstores of Telegraph Ave, the Midnight Movies and the First Annual Holy Man Jam.

What We See

What We See Is What We Think

 At twelve, the disintegrations of afternoon

 Began, the return to phantomerei, if not

 To phantoms. Till then, it had been the other way:

 One imagines the violet trees but the trees stood green,

 At twelve, as green as they would ever be. 

The sky was blue beyond the vaultiest praise. 

 Twelve meant as much as: the end of normal time,

 Straight up, an élan without harrowing, 

The imprescriptible zenith, free of harangue, 

 Twelve and the first gray second after, a kind 

Of violet gray, a green violet, a thread

 To weave a shadow's leg or sleeve, a scrawl

 On the pedestal, an ambitious page dog-eared

 At the upper right, a pyramid with one side

 Like a spectral cut in its perception, a tilt

 And its tawny caricature and tawny life,

 Another thought, the paramount ado …

 Since what we think is never what we see.

--Wallace Stevens 

 Those moderns! In poems of the past—of the 19th century English Romantics, for instance—the poet usually stated what the poem is about, or at least where the poet is while making the observations. Modern(ist) poets tend to leave that out. T.S. Eliot is a notorious example. 

 While the basic situation of the modernist Wallace Stevens poem is clear enough—he’s observing the sun and the shadows at noon, as well as the pictures in his imagination—there are other elements that are obscure. In his book on Stevens’ poetry titled Musing the Obscure, all Ronald Sukenick says about this poem is the Stevensesque non sequiter: “As reality becomes less adequate, imagination becomes more necessary.” Well, maybe.

 In his science-oriented interpretation, Mike White helpfully suggests that the passage beginning “To weave a shadow’s leg or sleeve...” refers to a traditional sundial, as in the recent past often was placed in a garden, and at which the poet is presumably including in his gaze. So that’s something.

 As for me, I like its music. It may be as Stevens’ asserts, that poetry is the scholar’s art, at least in modernist times. But just the phrase “an elan without harrowing” is reason enough for me.

The Daily Lear

 

FDJoe?

The First Hundred Days of the Biden Administration are officially over, and many comparisons are being made to the administration that provided the concept of the 100 Days in the first place: that of FDR, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

 I’ve been reading about the 1930s lately, and these comparisons seem apt in at least two regards.  Biden, like FDR, has begun and proposed structural, economic, physical and social policy changes that would likely define at least a generation into the future.  Moreover, though many of these changes in both cases have been made elsewhere or on a smaller scale, they are as creative as they are bold.

As Nicholas Kristof wrote so eloquently in last Sunday's New York Times, the basic intention of  FDR's New Deal and Biden's announcement programs for rescue, jobs and family, are the same: to invest in ordinary non-wealthy Americans, and the places where they live, to both improve their lives and jumpstart new economic opportunities and prosperity.  

 FDR's environmental initiatives are less well known but substantial, while Biden would only like to save the planet.  By sincerely and boldly addressing the Depression, FDR very like saved American democracy.  President Biden would like to save it through safeguarding the integrity and equality of the vote, now under determined attack by the Republican party and the state governments they hold. 

 We are still living with the vital help of what FDR began: Social Security, the minimum wage, the banking system, the forty hour week and ban on child labor, and much more.  We still cross the bridges (large and small) and work in the buildings that New Deal programs built.

 Some of Biden’s proposals could be as far reaching and last as long.  Some are extensions of FDR’s: bringing broadband to rural areas is only possible because FDR brought electric power to rural areas.  And Biden even has a version of the Civil Conservation Corps.

 And like FDR, Biden has communicated his plans and rationales for them in succinct and easily understood terms directly to the American people.  FDR did this with his fireside chats on the radio as well as formal speeches.  Biden has begun doing it with a press conference, an address to the nation and his recent address to a joint session of Congress that amounts to a State of the Union. 

 In his analysis of that speech, Jeff Greenfield called his approach “whispering.”  “His speech was delivered almost as conversation, rather than a series of declamations. He kept his voice, for long stretches, at times a near-whisper of empathy or concern—a tone that would have been completely unworkable in a full room,” Greenfield noted.  

Biden used the crowd limited by Covid to speak with the intimacy of FDR’s radio chats.  FDR pictured a family seated around the radio and spoke to them.  Biden was more aware of the room—he kept referring to the congressional audience—but he spoke with that same tone and direct vocabulary.

 But there are significant differences.  There was a more compelling sense of crisis in America, both among the voters and among the power elites and political class in the 1930s.  When FDR took office in March 1933, coal barons came to the White House begging him to take over ownership of their mines (though he didn’t.) 

 It may well be that the majority of American voters today see the global pandemic as threatening now as the 1930s voters saw the global banking crisis.  But a significant number of voters and politicians do not.  Similarly, there are large majorities today in favor of long-delayed changes like support for child care, early childhood education and support, free community college, and efforts to address the climate emergency through American jobs.  But FDR was able to institute programs of such scope with long-term implications because he was also addressing widely recognized crises.  Biden knows that many Americans are hurting, even if our media swirl doesn't.  But if there is a commensurate sense of crisis, it may be what Stewart Udall once called the environmental situation: the quiet crisis.  Will that be enough?   

 A corresponding difference is the overwhelming political support that FDR brought to the White House.  He won 42 of the 48 states in 1932.  He had large Democratic majorities in the House and Senate.  President Biden has majority approval in the polls, and his policies also have wide public support.  Though his own popular vote margin was impressive, he did not bring with him large Democratic majorities.  In fact, predictions now are that it is very likely Democrats will lose the House in 2022, and could easily also lose the Senate. 

 So while FDR did not accomplish the New Deal in his first 100 days any more than Biden has accomplished his announced plans—Social Security did not became law until 1935 —he had the time to explain his plans, to obtain comprehension of what he wanted to do and why, and to gather support, especially in Congress.  And he remained so popular that it was politically difficult to oppose him, Democrat or Republican. Though there were recalcitrant individuals and sectional interests, and a fair number of crazies, they did not have the power or the voter support they seem to have now for total opposition.  Perhaps they also did not have the self-righteous shamelessness.

 FDR’s popularity—he won reelection in 1936 by taking 46 of the 48 states—also provided the continuity for his initiatives to be accomplished over time, to be modified or even dropped if they weren’t working, and with a better program substituted. 

 This continuity of administration may be a major reason why President Biden and the congressional Democrats are really interested in a bipartisan infrastructure bill.  They want to lessen the chances of a possible Republican Congress dismantling this program.

 Much can happen in the next year or so.  President Biden may yet become FDJoe.  Or these amazing months, and these amazing proposals, may become a brief and tantalizing glimpse of the America that could be, or could have been, rather than the suicidal mess it can still return to becoming.  A lot depends on the 2022 elections.  And so, a lot depends on what happens from now until then.

No Stronger Than A Flower

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea 

 But sad mortality o’er-sways their power,

 How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,

 Whose action is no stronger than a flower?

 O, how shall summer’s honey breath hold out 

 Against the wrackful siege of batt’ring days,

 When rocks impregnable are not so stout,

 Nor gates of steel so strong, but time decays?

 O fearful meditation! where, alack,

 Shall time’s best jewel from time’s chest lie hid?

 Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?

 Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?

 O, none, unless this miracle have might,

 That in black ink my love may still shine bright. 

 Shakespeare

 Sonnet 65

Click on the photo to see it properly.

Ingenuity

 

It was a little more than a week ago, very early in the morning on the East Coast and even earlier here in the Western US, and not many people were watching.  The eyes of the news were on mass shootings, police killings of black Americans and the Chauvin trial.  But I happened across a link just as the NASA live feed was starting, so I got to see evidence of the first successful flight of a powered vehicle on another planet (or at least the first initiated by humans, that we know of) at the same time the people at NASA did.

 They were a dozen or so people around hotel convention tables arranged in a horseshow, all of them masked up, most of them wearing NASA orange smocks or golf shirts, peering at their own laptops and glancing up at the big screen at the end of the room.  Many of them had been working on this specific project for 6 years or more. 

 They were waiting to learn whether the flight of Ingenuity, a tiny Kleenix box of instruments attached to very long and ungainly shaped rotors, had actually flown a little earlier, since it takes hours for signals to traverse the distance between Mars and Earth.  Nobody really knew if flying would work in an atmosphere less than a percent of Earth's.

 The NASA channel—which, when I had it on our cable TV system and the Shuttles and Space Station had cameras always pointed towards Earth, I sometimes let just run with this portrait of our planet in real time, in the background—did a fine job of covering this Ingenuity flight story.  A brightly smiling interviewer elicited the pertinent information from various participants in the room, though the answers got less and less coherent as the big moment got closer and closer. 

 Then she did something pretty striking: she shut up, so we could just witness what went on in that room. As I watched the screen full of people watching their screens, I reflected on the deceptive amount of computer power in those laptops and inside that interplanetary tissue box on Mars, and the fact that the Apollo missions that landed humans on the moon had at their disposal much less computer power than a smartphone.      

 We who were watching (and some were: they had sent in questions through various social media) were primed on what to watch for.  So we got the quiet excitement when the initial data package came in, and it looked “nominal” (NASAspeak for A-OK.) The data went from one analyst to another, each adding more information until we all together got the first visual confirmation: a simple diagram, sent by Ingenuity via several links, that mapped its flight: it went straight up, flew sideways, stopped and came straight down, and landed.  That diagram was as exciting as HD video.  It meant it happened.  The first cheer went up in the room.

 A few seconds later we saw the first photo: a black and white snapshot taken by Ingenuity’s camera pointed straight down from the air, looking like a film photography negative, in which the shadow is Ingenuity itself.  There would be other photos and other flights this week, but this will remain the historic one. More cheers in the room, though social distancing meant no hugs.  But the project manager did jump up and down, in place.

 So it meant something to me to be watching this in real time, a memory to set beside seeing in real time the first human step onto the surface of another world When Neil Armstrong touched the Moon, we all did, in a way.  It was the same with Ingenuity’s flight.

 Ingenuity has flown farther and for a longer time, and will probably be pushed beyond its limits.  It’s a proof of concept device, and is unlikely to have a life even as long as the Martian rovers.  None of them are coming back.  It won’t be resting in the Smithsonian—at least, not anytime soon.

 This event, set against the others making news, like those irrational killings, and the raging flames of white supremacy, and within the complicated context of the pandemic, all the madness about masks and vaccines, reminded me again of a conversation I had several Christmases ago with young tech people in Menlo Park, about prospects for the future.  Though we had different intuitions of the outcome, we shared the basic idea of it being like a race—that is, a foot race or vehicle race—between the positive and negative, the creative and the destructive.

 Because it seems clear that as a society we are rushing furiously in two opposite directions at once (with many wiggling lines within the main ones going off slightly in other directions.)  Moreover, the race is timed.  Though we don’t know exactly when the game will be over, there may come such a moment that if destruction is winning, then self-destruction it will be.  And in terms of Earth as environment, that time is fast approaching.

 Who knows if flying a helicopter on Mars is going to contribute to saving the Earth.  (Not if it encourages the Elon Musks of this world to believe they can just leave this planet behind and start this madness all over again elsewhere.)  But those nerdy people in the orange shirts—Asian, black, and immigrant prominently among them—worked hard on this one problem for a long time, and they did something wonderful.  And they know it—they attached a shred of the first manned aircraft from Kitty Hawk to Ingenuity for its first flight.  Maybe future generations won’t care, but seeing something like this we call historic is at least a special experience for the now living.

For All Threatened Beings

Gatha for All Threatened Beings

 Ah Power that swirls us together

 Grant us bliss

 Grant us the great release

 And to all beings

 Vanishing, wounded,

 In trouble on earth, 

We pass on this love

 May their numbers increase 

 Gary Snyder 

 Gāthā is a Sanskrit term for "song" or "verse." I’m posting this in honor of the Humboldt Interfaith Fellowship event I witnessed online Sunday night, a Zoomed evening on the theme of hope and healing. It was a lovely experience. Although it was presented live on Zoom, you can see the recording of it through the HIF Facebook page.

Two Poems for Earth Day

Earth Dweller 

It was all the clods at once become

 precious; it was the barn, and the shed,

 and the windmill, my hands, the crack

 Arlie made in the ax handle: oh, let me stay

 here humbly, forgotten, to rejoice in it all;

 let the sun casually rise and set.

 If I have not found the right place,

 teach me; for, somewhere inside, the clods are

 vaulted mansions, lines through the barn sing

 for the saints forever, the shed and windmill

 rear so glorious the sun shudders like a gong.

 Now I know why people worship, carry around

 magic emblems, wake up talking dreams

 they teach to their children: the world speaks.

 The world speaks everything to us.

 It is our only friend.

 --William Stafford

The Epitaph Ending in And

 In the last storm, when hawks

 blast upward and a dove is

 driven into the grass, its broken wings

 a delicate design, the air between

 wracked thin where it stretched before,

 a clear spring bent close too often

 (that Earth should ever have such wings

 burnt on in blind color!), this will be

 good as an epitaph:

 Doves did not know where to fly, and

--William Stafford

Earth Day: The Dream Team at the Last Chance Saloon

Michael Grunwald’s Politico piece begins with Jigar Shah, a “green finance legend” who created Generate Capital, overseeing over 2,000 sustainable energy projects and co-hosts the top-rated iTunes climate podcast, but who nevertheless took a relatively obscure job doling out government energy loans because he wanted to be part of the Biden effort to confront the climate emergency which requires an “all-hands-on-deck” response.The piece continues: 

 “We’re in a unique time,” Shah said. “There’s a power of now, a real sense we need to get to work on the big things we haven’t done since FDR. And there’s a new sheriff in town.” 

 The sheriff has recruited a Who’s Who of veteran climate leaders along with a mission-driven posse of outspoken younger climate wonks and activists to help him take on global warming. Biden’s climate all-stars will help him as well as pressure him to keep his climate pledges, including a zero-emissions electric grid by 2035, a carbon-neutral nation by 2050 and the 2030 goals he plans to announce this week at his Earth Day climate summit.”

 Grunwald describes the team that Biden has assembled, including his most senior White House climate aides:”all former managers of large agencies who are now content just to have the president’s ear.” This team also includes the Cabinet, selected with the climate in mind:

 “And while it’s not surprising that a Democratic Cabinet would include committed climate officials like Michael Regan at EPA, Deb Haaland at Interior and Jennifer Granholm at Energy, Biden’s transportation, commerce and labor secretaries, Pete Buttigieg, Gina Raimondo and Marty Walsh, sound just as climate-forward. Buttigieg ran for president as a climate champion; Raimondo pushed America’s first offshore wind farm as governor of Rhode Island, and Walsh, the former Boston mayor, took over the Climate Mayors coalition in November before he was tapped to join the new administration. Even Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who took a mostly traditional approach to the same job under Obama, keeps saying that climate will be one of his top priorities this time around.”

 Even Biden’s chief of staff has climate credentials. “And a diverse array of next-generation voices from the worlds of advocacy, philanthropy, think tanks and government have moved from Climate Twitter to powerful roles throughout the Biden Administration.”

 Grunwald sums up the import of all this: 

It’s often said in Washington that personnel is policy, and it would be hard for the president not to push the climate envelope after hiring so many envelope-pushers. If Biden has recruited the climate equivalent of America’s 1992 Olympic “Dream Team” — as Ali Zaidi, McCarthy’s deputy, describes it — his Michael Jordans and Charles Barkleys will all expect to hoop." 

The team leaves behind the slog of disputes that have kept meaningful efforts from being made. For example, as one participant said: “The assumption is that climate isn’t just aligned with the economic agenda, it is the economic agenda.” 

Not everyone sees such clarity in the Biden team—at the Atlantic, Robinson Meyer worries that progress can’t get past contradictory analyses. But in concentrating on the people involved, Grunwald makes a good case that this is the make-it-or-break it team we’ve been waiting for, and building towards.

 It may be too late, and they may end up accomplishing too little, too slowly. Events may well overtake these efforts, and other factors—such as the continuing power of such reactionary responses as white supremacy to weaken the kind of societal cohesion that may well be necessary to face both the causes and consequences of the climate emergency—may end up being fatal. 

But fighting the good fight at the very least ennobles the present, and without these efforts, the future of the Earth is all but guaranteed to be tragic for life as we know it, and certainly for humanity. For those who love the Earth and will continue to participate in this society, this should be an exciting time.

The Trip

The Trip

 Our car was fierce enough;

 no one could tell we were only ourselves;

 so we drove, equals of the car,

 and ate at a drive-in where Citizens were dining. 

A waitress with eyes made up to be Eyes

 brought food spiced by the neon light. 

 Watching, we saw the manager greet people—

 hollow on the outside, some kind of solid veneer. 

When we got back on the road we welcomed

 it as a fierce thing welcomes the cold.

 Some people are so dull

 that you always remember their names.

William Stafford

News News: The Faked and the Baked

 

There’s the faked news.  And there’s the baked news.

 The plethora of fake news and the abundance of misinformation as a primary problem in this society are well known phenomena.  Much of it is dispatched through social media, but web sites and publications masquerading as news outlets contribute mightily.

 Aspects of the Internet make these easier to promulgate, and more seductive, as mentioned here before. But the fundamental reason misinformation and fake news exist is that people believe it.  Why do they believe it? Partly because they want to or need to (and their social relationships and identities depend on them believing it.)  And then there’s the basic formula described generations ago that enables all kinds of scams: there’s a sucker born every minute. 

 It’s an education problem, too.  Too many people don’t know how to judge the information flooding into their phones and their online lives.  They aren’t educated in how to judge credibility, and they don’t know enough about the subject matter to spot inaccuracies.  As Katherine Hall Jamison points out, with civics no longer taught in many schools, people don’t understand the roles or functions of the branches of government.  There’s also a kind of automatic dismissing of any authority that’s part of the anger and resentment.  Add to that a lack of awareness of the power of algorithms in creating the appearance of massive agreement and therefore credibility, creating an emotional tide that breaks through ordinary skepticism and creates cults of mutually reinforcing true believers in outlandishly false narratives. 

 Additionally however, the current media environment has been partly prepared by changes over recent decades in how news is reported in traditional news outlets. 

 Around seventh grade I learned the fundamentals of news writing: the inverted pyramid of who, what, when and where, with the basic story in the first paragraph and contributing detail in order of importance in the paragraphs after it.  And the front page news stories I was reading in the Greensburg Evening Tribune pretty much adhered to that formula.  The bad old days of biased news dictated by political interests and ownership were supposedly over, because there were now Standards.

 That was in the mid 1950s.  But by the early 1990s, when I was trying—unsuccessfully as it turned out—to teach a course in news writing, I had problems finding real world news stories that matched the standards I was teaching.  And it wasn’t just Richard Scaife’s right wing 1980s fake news pioneer, that same Greensburg Tribune-Review.  I noted in particular coverage of a speech by then President Clinton in the New York Times.  There was a front page news story, and a piece labeled as news commentary also on the front page.  Their first paragraphs were nearly identical.  As wholes, the pieces were very similar.

 The news story judged the speech, and by 1950s standards, failed to report it.  A story that adhered to the once-professional and now academic guidelines would have selected the most important statements to quote in the first paragraph, while including the who, when and where. The next paragraphs would have quoted more from the speech, and eventually maybe quoted reactions of prominent people to the speech.

 But the 1990s story quoted very little, and pontificated on the meaning and the failure of the speech.  As did the commentary.  It was quite an eye-opening combination.  In this case the news wasn’t exactly faked, but it was baked. 

 I can just about date the dwindling of the old standards, when the inertia and laziness that accompanied them became more obvious. Cognitive dissonance arose in the 1960s, when, as usual, the official pronouncements concerning the Vietnam war were dutifully reported as news.  Unfortunately, as news providers slowly accepted, these statements clashed with the realities that on-the-ground reporters saw. Others pointed as well to historical distortions and buried ideological assumptions.

  Newspapers were just about dumbfounded for awhile.  They were used to treating official pronouncements, not only as news, but as the only news. They really could not figure out what to do when officials, including President Johnson, regularly lied.  (The media was a little quicker to adjust to Trump but it did take awhile.  Still, I marveled at the reporting in his last year, when stories were very blunt about this President of the United States being a serial liar.)

 The flummoxed—and fearful—established press was slow to adapt.  That provided the space for a new type of newspaper, known today as the alternative press.  These newspapers—usually weeklies, tabloid format, often given away—combined the countercultural spirit of the underground press with the journalistic standards of the established press but adapted to this new situation as well as a younger readership..  (It was for this reason that an early article on alternative newspapers in the New Yorker --I’m pretty sure it was by Calvin Trillin-- referred to them as “sea-level” publications.)

 I was a writer and editor for several of them, beginning with the Boston Phoenix.  We adopted aspects of another trend of the time, the so-called New Journalism that used storytelling techniques borrowed from literary forms, to our reporting as well.  Apart from our cultural criticism, we published news according to those established standard.  Our tone could be excessive, but basically we just included more facts, more voices, and a broader area of subject matter than simply quoting officials and the official line.  Apart from doing stories the established papers were afraid of, or didn’t know anything about.  At best, these papers were true alternatives: adding other voices, more information, because while the official pronouncements were news, they were not the only news. 

 By the mid-1970s the sea-level papers nudged the dailies to more contemporary cultural coverage (often hiring our critics) and a bit more skepticism in news coverage, although it was the Pentagon Papers and Watergate that really institutionalized the change.

 But if the 60s and 70s saw point of view, analysis and opinion creeping into news, all of that became turbocharged by the nearly simultaneous rise of cable TV news and social media.  The news was already starting to become pastries; sweet TV soundbites led easily to bite-sized stories in USA Today and People magazine.  As news media were absorbed into cost-conscious conglomerates, the number of reporters began to dwindle, a trend that turned into a stampede when the Internet hit.  The news bureaus and reporters that TV networks and newspapers used to have all over the country and in at least the western world are mostly gone.  Local news reporting barely exists.  The vacuum of reporting has to be filled with something, and that’s usually the hot air of patter and opinion.

So today the news that isn’t faked is usually baked.  It is formed into little cakes for us to consume.  Just about every headline these days includes the words “here’s why,” or “here’s how.”  We’re told what the five or seven or three “takeaways” are.  We’re told what stuff means rather than presented with the stuff itself.

 Then there are the stories that purport to tell us “why we like X” or “why we can’t stop watching Y.”  But this is not the old-fashioned editorial we, meaning the writer representing the publication.  No—it is “we” the readers, presumed to be one with the writer’s tastes and opinions.  Just one big happy social media mob (or perhaps the demographic group the outlet lusts to capture.)

 Network television news reflects the changes.  Networks evening news probably does more stories that it used to, but in briefer and more superficial form.  When they saw themselves as a public service, they risked boring visuals to detail, for example, a presidential proposal, at least in bullet points.  Now its quick visuals and blather.  On the day President Biden proposed his jobs bill, the infrastructure package, the story ran just about last on one evening broadcast, as repetitive generic visuals accompanied by lots of puns on the “road” to passage, or “building bridges” in Congress.   The Sunday interview shows used to be commentary on the news reported during the week.   Now every day is Sunday, with its panels of pundits shaking and baking, bloviating on what was never actually reported.

 As for political point of view in reporting, I make no false equivalence.  The so-called left wing media can be excessive and downright hysterical, but by and large, the hosts for, say, MSNBC, do not distort facts or lie.  Right wing media, including FOX, lies and distorts all the time.  It’s their main business.

 While faked news is a serious problem, baked news is at least annoying, and potentially a problem.  When news media report at least some of what official say (before rushing to the reactions), this reporting requires the same skills to evaluate as it as it used to: you have to know who is talking, how credible they are, what their self-interest is.  That’s our job as readers, our part of this relationship, and it means we are the arbiters of the news.  Baked news takes over that role, and I tend to resent it.  Moreover, it confuses things.  I may read opinions, marked as such. They can be valuable if I am also presented with what they are opining about.  A cacophony of nothing but opinions makes it easier for distortions to take hold, and easier for readers to give up trying to figure out the truth.

In the real world, how straight news was reported had its weaknesses.  In The Boys on the Bus, his brilliant book on the national press covering the 1972 McGovern campaign, Timothy Crouse described how reporters, terrified that they would miss the story other newspapers got out of the day's events, would see what the lead AP reporter filed and then write their stories to match.  If they all selected the same story to write, nobody would get in trouble with their editors for missing what other papers published.  He called it Pack Journalism.  This conformity is dangerous enough in reporting.  But these days, spin and opinions travel like wildfires through the day's news cycle, so there is a conventional wisdom based mostly on repeating what everyone else is saying.  Each cable channel has already arrived at its position by afternoon, and there's little unbaked information left for the citizen--sorry, the consumer-- to assess.    

 For though the cake may be delicious it may also be poisonous.  And don’t let all those links in Internet stories fool you into thinking it must be credible.  I read a piece recently in which the writer summarized an article in support of his position and helpfully provided the link. When I followed that link I found that, lo and behold, the article did not say what he said it said.  But at least I had the information to check.

 Part of baked news is the rise of pundits, the yeast in the mix.  Apparently since officials are either cynical hypocrites or merely mouthing soundbites they pay others to write for them (or both), the real news comes from pundits.  That’s becoming excessive.  Apart from their often inflated professional credentials, there’s too much we don’t know about where their opinions and analysis is coming from.  There are likely all kinds of conflicts of interest we don’t know about.  We have to judge what they say with the same standards as we should judge pronouncements by officials and other anointed authorities.

 Some baked news is better than others.  Rachel Maddow does what alternative press or magazines used to: provide a narrative framework, often historical, and link things into a pattern.  Sure, she repeats the same point about five times in a row, but she’s doing more than offering an opinion—she’s laying out a pattern for us to judge, or just enjoy.

  And that’s part of what’s going on with news: more than ever, it’s become entertainment.  That cannot at this point be called news to anybody, but it’s worth remembering.  They don’t call them shows for nothing.  Even newspapers don’t compete for readers primarily by obtaining “scoops” or ferreting out news nobody else gets.  They get you to eat their pastries.  And they are so addictive. 

The Morning Hills

The Morning Hills

As those who are gone now

 keep wandering through our words

 sounds of paper following them

 at untold distances

 so I wake again in the old house

 where at times I have believed

 that I was waiting for myself

 and many years have gone

 taking with them the semblance of youth

 reason after reason ranges of blue hills 

who did I think was missing

 those days neither here nor there

 my own dog waiting 

to be known 

-- W.S. Merwin

Manchinations

West Virginia is America writ small.  In a remarkably short and easily verified time, European transplants felled the great forests of the East, moved on to tear up the Midwestern prairie, over-grazed the grasslands of the great wild West and otherwise dug up, poisoned and destroyed the land, air and water to the point where it's increasingly difficult for them to replenish themselves and sustain the life that had previous proliferated on this continent.  While of course wiping out the civilizations that preceded them.  All of that contributes mightily to the global climate and environmental crises.

It's the same and mostly ongoing story in every state, but it remains a particularly obvious feature of West Virginia, where in the process of demolishing the natural environment, to the point of blowing the tops off huge mountains, industries owned by the rich enriched themselves, while exploiting, deforming and impoverishing not only the land but the rest of the people, yet convincing them that it's for their own good.  

Most other states show conspicuous signs of change, for good or ill, and often dramatic and dynamic tensions.  But West Virginia seems determined to double down on what is destroying it, namely the coal industry.  Population is steadily dropping, the economy is in free fall, but the legislature maintains its fealty to the coal barons.

Meanwhile, its Democratic Senator Joe Manchin is lapping up his fame as the deciding vote in the Senate, making demands and pronouncements, notably on the filibuster.  He is unshakably opposed to changing it because, he says, the filibuster promotes bi-partisanship.

The only possibly true thing in that statement is that he opposes ending or apparently even modifying the filibuster, by which every significant piece of legislation requires 60 votes, not just a majority 51.  For nearly the full 8 years of the Obama administration, the Republicans used the filibuster to obstruct every piece of legislation proposed by a Democrat, regardless of its content.  They never compromised, only obstructed.  That's only one of the factual arguments that makes Manchin's argument absurd.

So what is really going on?  I propose two related possibilities.  First, Manchin doesn't want to be the deciding vote, because he wants to be able to vote against anything which threatens to threaten the coal barons of his state, without offending his party leadership.  If he's the swing vote, he can't get away with that--he'll have to make enemies of somebody.  So he needs the filibuster to provide him cover by requiring 60 votes instead of 51.

More specifically, I wonder if this isn't aimed at the infrastructure bill.  Manchin wants an infrastructure bill--he wants the money for West Virginia's crumbling roads and bridges, etc. that it can't even afford to repair.  But his coal baron overlords don't want all the green energy stuff currently in the bill.

The outcome he may be looking for is that the Biden administration jobs/infrastructure bill gets split into several bills, one of which is a roads and bridges infrastructure bill that Republicans can vote for--which means all that green energy and climate crisis stuff will be stripped out of it.  Then when the green stuff gets into another bill, Manchin can vote against it and still get the big highway bucks for West Virginia.  

If that's what he's doing--and I have no idea if it is, this is just my suspicion--it's a very dangerous game, not only for him, but for the country and its future.