TV and Me: Disney (Part 1) Fantasyland

Television and I grew up together.  This is our story.  Seventh in a series.

 It started with the movies.  The first movie I remember going to was Walt Disney’s Snow White at the Arcadia Theatre on Third Street in Youngwood, Pennsylvania, where children were admitted for a dime. It was 1952, I was five or six, and memorably frightened by the wicked witch carrying that bright red poison apple.

  The Arcadia was up the street and down a block from my grandparents’ house on Depot Street.  Either my mother took me to Snow White, or it was one of the times that I walked to the Arcadia in the charge of older children, a trusted brother and sister, neighbors on Depot Street.  I’d like to think it was my mother, because she had seen this movie when it first came out in 1938, when she was 18. She named it in the diary she kept for most of January 1939 as one of her top ten movies of the previous year. When I saw it in 1952, it was only the second time it had been back in theatres since then.

 I saw other Disney movies and cartoons at the Arcadia and the Manos Theatre in Greensburg, but memories of those are tangled up with learning about them on the television show that over the decades would go by several different names, but which began in 1954 as Disneyland.

 Disneyland the TV show was my strongest connection to Disney stories, and those stories were a major feature of my childhood.  Walt Disney’s reputation has been shaken in more recent years, particularly for his involvement in the Blacklist.  And those stories look different now, not only in aspects that are questionable today.  Some didn’t appeal to me, but on  balance, Disney and his company’s creations and the discoveries they led to, were constructive elements of my cultural education, and my childhood in general, including its quotient of joy. 

 In the early 1950s, the movie industry was terrified of television.  It seemed that box office numbers were dropping in proportion to the growing number of TV sets in American homes.  But the industry still had hopes of crushing this fledgling competitor. For as late as 1953, the TV listings in the Pittsburgh dailies were still considerably smaller than either the radio listings or the movie theatre ads.

 The big movie studios principal weapon was denying their recent films and their big stars from appearing on the home screen.  Even as television prospered with older movie content, and made new stars of B movie actors and bit players like Milton Berle, Lucille Ball and William (Hopalong Cassidy) Boyd, the studios stuck to their strategy.  If they could hold out just a little longer…

 The Walt Disney Company meanwhile was a Hollywood  anomaly.  Long before Disney became the behemoth of Hollywood, a conglomerate prospering on creations of companies it bought and absorbed, it was a modest movie studio that released only cartoon shorts and the relative few features it made.  

But Disney prospered by adopting (or inventing) new techniques and technologies, and using them to tell stories.  In 1938 Snow White was not only his first animated feature-- it was the first animated feature movie, period.  It was preceded by more than a decade of Walt Disney’s earlier innovations, among them the first cartoon to use sound synchronized to the action (“Steamboat Willie,” the debut of Disney’s prime star, Mickey Mouse) and the first full color movie cartoon—in Technicolor, no less.

 Snow White became the biggest box office hit of any Hollywood film to that time. But several animated features that followed didn’t do as well. The studio’s fortunes were further stymied by World War II, which cut out lucrative foreign markets except the UK, where Disney movies could be shown but their profits were frozen until after the war, and even then could only be spent within Great Britain.

 After making scores of training films and other patriotic movies during the war, the company clawed its way back by packaging animated shorts.  Then Disney went all in on a new animated feature in 1950—and Cinderella was a huge hit.  

In the early 50s, the company began using those sequestered profits to make some live action movies in the UK.  They did well, and Walt Disney wanted to do more. Then television came calling.

 Disney knew the standard Hollywood argument: that if people could get high quality images-and-sound entertainment at home, they wouldn’t be buying tickets at the box office to see it in theatres.  (This was the era, by the way, when movie theatres were installing—and bragging loudly about—air conditioning, as well as experimenting with 3-D, smell-o-vision and Cinerama.)

 But as usual Disney saw a bigger picture.  As the guy who introduced Mickey Mouse with a cornucopia of merchandising, he intuited that different elements could reinforce each other.  He was going to test that approach with his latest idea: an entertainment theme park he wanted to build called Disneyland.   By Hollywood’s theory, he was subverting the movies by enticing people to get their entertainment in an amusement park.  But he didn’t see it that way.  He didn’t see subtraction.  He saw multiplication.

 So when all three TV networks were wooing him, he imposed an unusual condition: he required that the network contribute a sizeable investment in cash and loan guarantees for Disneyland, the park.

 In the early 1950s, a family-friendly theme park was as unknown as an animated feature film before 1938. Nobody believed the park was going to work. CBS and NBC passed. (Apparently the Dumont network, already on life support, wasn’t considered.)  ABC was almost as small as Dumont but having recently merged with United Paramount movie theatres, it had some cash.   As a major Hollywood movie name, Disney would give ABC instant credibility.  It was worth the risk.  They made the deal in March 1954.

 Disneyland the park was financed and under construction when the weekly series of one-hour television programs, not coincidentally also called Disneyland, premiered on the ABC network at 7:30 on Wednesday evening, October 27, 1954.  It was sponsored by American Motors (Hudson, Nash, Rambler), the ABC network of automakers.

 In 1954, a gallon of gasoline at the pump cost 29 cents (which was paid in cash to the attendant who filled the tank, while wiping the windshield.) A loaf of bread at the corner grocer was about 20 cents, a quart of milk was a quarter.  First class postage was three cents. The average cost of a new house was $1700.  So basically, Back to the Future.

 I was in the third grade.  My classmates and I had just eagerly lined up for our first polio shots, with the vaccine developed by Dr. Jonas Salk in nearby Pittsburgh, who had ended this grim cause of fear for all children.

 The show opened with Tinkerbell from Peter Pan flying in sparkly orbit to the plaintive voice of Jiminy Cricket from Pinocchio, singing “When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are…” 

The announcer’s voice (familiar from many movie theatre preview narrations) told us: “Each week as you enter this timeless land, one of these many worlds will open to you: Fantasyland, the happiest kingdom of them all.  Tomorrowland, promise of things to come.  Adventureland, the wonderworld of nature’s own realm. Frontierland, tall tales and true from the legendary past.

 Walt Disney himself was the onscreen host.  The first episode introduced the series, and then moved to the world most associated with him: the animated stories of Fantasyland. 

 Fantasyland: From Alice to Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah

 The second half of that first episode provided a quick history of the studio’s biggest star, Mickey Mouse. When presenting animation, especially in this first year, Disney illustrated and explained how it was done.  Some would argue that this could spoil children’s belief in what they saw, or its magical feeling, like opening the curtain to show the Wizard of Oz working the levers and pulling the strings. But I remember being entirely absorbed by it. Disney didn’t talk down to children watching; he explained everything as he would to adults.  It only made me more eager to see the finished product, when I promptly dropped into that world completely.

 The second show was devoted to Alice in Wonderland, his animated feature originally released just three years before. It was an appropriate choice, for Alice was Disney’s first fantasyland star in the 1920s, even before Mickey.  The young animator produced a series of  short Alice comedies which (like the contemporaneous Fleischer “Out of the Inkwell” cartoon series) combined live action and animation.  The live action stars of the first, called “Alice’s Wonderland” were Alice (a very 1920s child) and young Walt himself, setting up the premise as the animator of the wonderland Alice would inhabit.  

Once he began to make feature films, Disney tried to adapt the Lewis Carroll stories several times, as animation, or a live action film (to star Mary Pickford) and even a combination of the two, to star Ginger Rogers.  Storyboards were created, many songs written and scripts attempted (one by Aldous Huxley.)  But it wasn’t until several years after World War II that he found the key to making it work.

  The serendipitous event that made Alice possible was an unpredictable byproduct of one of Walt Disney’s darkest hours.  After years of pleading with management, Disney animators finally organized into a union and went on strike in 1941.  Walt Disney, who worked closely with his creative teams and organized his studio to encourage personal relationships in ways familiar now as a prototype for high tech company campuses, was furious.  He became convinced the union was a Communist conspiracy, and reportedly testified to that view even years later, when he named names to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee.

 Walt Disney refused to negotiate, so he saw a picket line of angry animators and their families and sympathizers on his studio lot, while work on the upcoming animated feature Dumbo slowed to a crawl.  So he accepted a longstanding request from the State Department for a goodwill tour of South America.  He was gone a month, during which his brother Roy Disney, who ran the studio business, came to an agreement with the union that met his animators’ initial demands. 

Meanwhile Walt Disney toured South America with his wife and a studio entourage that included a young artist named Mary Blair.  Photos suggest she was a striking figure (though apparently not on strike), very fashionably dressed and coiffed.  On this trip she was impressed by the juxtaposition of bold and bright colors she found in South America, particularly among native populations and in the rainforests.

 When Disney revived the Alice in Wonderland project after the war, Mary Blair provided some concept sketches that combined these bright colors with the oblique shapes and three-dimensional design found in the California School of Watercolor style that she knew. Walt Disney immediately saw that not only was this a new and dynamic look, but it suggested a narrative emphasis on the whimsically strange elements of Carroll’s book.  He finally had a generative starting point.  Mary Blair determined the color palette for the resulting animation.

 But when the movie was finally finished, Walt worried that the Alice story didn’t pull all the emotional strings common to successful Disney animation features.  Sensing difficulty in the movie marketplace, he made his first foray into television with an hour show meant to promote Alice’s theatrical release, four years before his first Disneyland episode.

 Disney made a one hour show for the 1950 Christmas season, shortly before the release of his Alice in Wonderland. (He consistently related Alice to the English tradition of Christmas storytelling, and the Lewis Carroll story remains a Christmas holiday staple.)  

 Sponsored by Coca Cola, the premise is a holiday party whose guest of honor is Kathyrn Beaumont, the voice and living image of Alice (she also voiced Wendy in Peter Pan.) 

Guests at the party include the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his two most famous dummies, the city swell Charlie McCarthy and the country bumpkin Mortimer Snerd (there’s a priceless moment when Mortimer is in conversation with a stuffed Goofy, his Disney counterpart as the tongue-tied country clown.) 

 Other guests included young Bobby Driscoll, winner of a special juvenile actor Oscar who would be the voice of Peter Pan, and Disney’s two teenage daughters.  The entertainment centered on a Magic Mirror, in which a genie (played by Hans Conreid, the voice of Captain Hook) called up a Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck cartoon, and scenes from Disney’s Snow White, Song of the South and, of course, Alice in Wonderland. 

The show didn’t do much for the Alice box office, but it did turn out to be a prototype for Disneyland.  (Even the Hans Conreid Magic Mirror would turn up again on the show.)

 It turned out Disney was right to worry about the movie.  Alice in Wonderland didn’t do well at the movie box office in 1951, especially compared to the gigantic popularity of its immediate predecessor, Cinderella.  So it wasn’t a hard choice to show a TV hour version of it on Disneyland.  The gamble of it succeeding on television when it didn’t in theatres paid off. 

This Alice in Wonderland was made because of Mary Blair‘s spectacular use of color (she also did Cinderella and Peter Pan in the early 50s), but it became ironic as well as iconic as a popular TV episode in black and white. 

 Disney was a fearless innovator, but he also never did anything once.  Disneyland episodes, or parts of them, were rerun over and over, and the black and white version of Alice is all anybody saw for the next ten years, when it became the most famous version of the Lewis Carroll story, certainly for my generation. 

 Our image of Alice, the White Rabbit (“I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date”), Ed Wynn’s Mad Hatter (including the monologue which matched Wynn improvising) and the Cheshire Cat, were all Disney images. (Of course those images were seen in color in magazines, storybooks and other merchandise, as well as in Disneyland, the park.)

 Once the Disney show moved to NBC for its color capabilities and became Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, the hour version appeared in color for the first time in 1964.  It would be another decade before the entire movie returned to theatres.  I may have seen one or the other of the color versions, but I didn’t fully appreciate the amazing colors until I saw the DVD.  I could understand why the makers of Yellow Submarine copied so much of it, but even they couldn’t get quite as psychedelic as this. 

 In the lean years during and just after World War II when the Disney studio couldn’t afford to make  animated features, they released a series of compilations or “package films” of feature length, but comprised of several short animated films.  One of these in 1949 combined two stories in The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad.  Both stories memorably showed up on Disneyland in its first two seasons, with different titles. 

Under the title of the original novel, The Wind in the Willows, the Mr. Toad story appeared as the first season episode 15 in February 1955.  The saga of the overenthusiastic Mr. Toad of Toad Hall begins when his animal friends try to dissuade him from causing expensive mayhem by driving his yellow horsecart with reckless abandon.  But Mr. Toad is distracted from contrition and reform by the sight of a brand new wonder, “a motor car!”  I can remember how he said those words, and the look in his astonished, ravenous eyes as he said them, from that day to this.

 The well-known Basil Rathbone (the Sherlock Holmes film series) narrates the tale, and Mr. Toad was voiced by Eric Blore, who in the intervening decades I’ve come to admire as a comic genius in supporting film roles of the 30s and 40s, particularly the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers classic Top Hat.

 The Ichabod Crane story, again under its original title of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” a short fiction by Washington Irving, appeared in a second season episode in October 1955.  This is a more sinister, New England Puritan tale, that we knew by the name of the character that most attracted our attention, the Headless Horseman.  Notably it doesn’t have a happy ending.  The ghost story quality is balanced by a comic approach to Ichabod and a breezy narration by Bing Crosby.

 Using the voices of Bing Crosby and Basil Rathbone, well-known to adults, didn’t make much difference to children, but Disney always played to family audiences, never so intently than with his television show. His discourses on techniques of animation and other factual presentations were pitched to interest parents as well as their children. They, after all, had probably seen these classic movies in their own childhoods. By starting his hour at 7:30 p.m., Disney bridged the traditional children’s hour with the start of adult prime time.  And by getting parents interested, it helped insure that their children wouldn’t be prevented from watching. 

 Showing a more or less complete animated feature such as Alice in Wonderland would turn out to be a rare event on Disneyland.  More frequent were the excerpts, along with background and behind the scenes stories, that whetted young appetites for the full meal.  

That technique was first on display in the first season’s sixth episode in December 1954, “A Story of Dogs,” which detailed the making of the upcoming animated theatrical feature, Lady and the Tramp. Fully completed key scenes were the hour’s climax.  A later episode in February showed how the music for the film was created, with more scenes.  By the time the movie came to local theatres that summer of 1955, we were eager to see it.

 This approach worked not only for new movies but for previously released films, especially those that were re-released to theatres in the 1950s.  So we got programs that discussed and showed pieces of Snow White and Cinderella—big hits for the studio—but especially  movies that didn’t do so well on their first run, like Fantasia and Pinocchio (both from 1940) as well as an originally lesser hit, like Bambi (1942.)  These programs preceded their theatrical re-releases (Pinocchio in 1954, Fantasia in 1956 and Bambi in 1957.)

 We all loved Pinocchio, even as it touched a nerve in donkey-inclined little boys (who lacked a Jiminy Crickett companion), but though the TV show got us into the theatre for Fantasia, it did not prevent a bad boy rebellion all around me after an hour of the Saturday matinee. I remember being bored by some of it, but mostly fascinated by the visuals as they worked with the music.  We weren’t used to classical music, so even what I now recognize as conductor Leopold Stokowski’s bombastic approach didn’t make us much more comfortable.  Seeing it today is a mixed bag of brilliance and kitsch. 

Watching excerpts of Bambi on TV prepared us for some of the hardest moments when we saw it at the movies. Though it has since become a cynical epithet, Bambi was such a powerful experience that I’ve almost repressed seeing it.  Small wonder that AFI named it the third best animated film of all time—and Time Magazine included it in its top 25 horror movies.

 In its initial release in 1942 however, Bambi had indifferent box office, and did even worse in its first re-release in the late 40s.  But after its exposure on Disneyland, it did very well in its 1957 return to theatres, doubling the box office of its previous revival.

 The Disneyland TV show became so effective in reaching huge potential audiences that the usual practice of re-releasing the animated features every seven years or longer was accelerated in several cases. For instance, Peter Pan, first released in 1953 just before Disneyland started, went back to theatres in 1958.  

Then there’s the case of the film-that-must-not-be-named.  Song of the South (1946) added animation to a live action story about a boy visiting a Georgia plantation after the Civil War, where he meets a sharecropper, Uncle Remus, who tells him animal stories that apply to the problems he’s having on his visit. 

 Disneyland devoted an hour in its second season (January 1956) to the history of Joel Chandler Harris, who wrote the Uncle Remus tales.  Excerpts were shown from the movie, particularly the “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” song sequence.  The song won the Academy Award, and James Baskett, who sang it and played Uncle Remus, won a special Oscar.  

Song of the South was re-released to theatres later in 1956, and had several subsequent re-releases for the next 30 years.  But it has since vanished.  It is never shown in theatres, television or any of the Disney streaming channels, and is not available on home video in the US.  To my knowledge only the “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” song and the attached animated tale is on DVD, as part of the 1950 Christmas show for Alice in Wonderland (a DVD extra.)  Bobby Driscoll (who played the boy in the film) asks the Magic Mirror to show it. 

 Disney knew it could be a sensitive subject when he made the movie, and tried to ensure it would not be racially offensive. However it later became politically unpalatable because of objections to its portrayal of black characters, particularly (I gather) the dialects employed.  It’s difficult to describe this, since I don’t remember the film—except for the song that we loved and sang all the time.  Whoopi Goldberg is among those suggesting it be shown again and discussed and evaluated now.  But we’ll return to this in a later discussion of the whole topic of ethnic humor and 1950s TV.

 Fantasyland on TV also combined with Fantasyland in the park that opened at the end of the first TV season in 1955, in a circle of reified and reinforced imagery and stories.  Disney merchandise, books (Golden Books, comic books, guides to animation, etc.) and newspaper comic strips were also involved.

 But to kids in the 1950s all this populated a world of discovery, of play, and of stories--all new to us, even if a little familiar from fairy tales, Golden Books and My Book House.  Fantasyland presented what Walt Disney had done from the beginning: animating tales and creating animated characters.  But he’d since gotten involved in other areas of filmmaking and storytelling, which then became a major part of Disneyland television. 

By the time the TV show came along, I was starting to age out of the prime animation audience, so these (mostly) live action shows were just as influential on my childhood—perhaps more so, and for longer… For there were three other lands.  And one of them almost immediately produced an effect that shook Hollywood to its foundations.

                               ---To Be Continued...

From Time to Time

 

It is the moment just before that we

 live over and over in its only time

 and then recount to those who were not there

 the beginning still echoes in laughter

 but resounds unrecognized every time

 and never comes back to begin again

 there are no words for calling after it

 and when it went it left no memory

 but the sound of the running sheep calling 

to the evening from the darkening hill

 what they are calling as they run is Wait

 what each of them is calling is Wait

 --W.S. Merwin

photo by Cartier-Bresson

Earth Elegy Day

Given the dire conclusions of earlier reports, it didn’t seem possible that the latest UN climate report would be shocking, in the sense of surprising in a very bad way.  But the first day media coverage of this report on confronting causes of the climate crisis focused on a shocking conclusion.

 “Now or Never” shouted the Reuters new service headline—“Only severe emissions cuts will avoid climate extremes—U.N. Report.”  More specifically, as the BBC site reported: “To avoid very dangerous warming, carbon emissions need to peak within three years, and fall rapidly after that.  Even then, technology to pull CO2 from the air will still be needed to keep temperatures down.”

 That was the shock: three years.  Since the last big climate meeting at Glasgow the refrain has been, only ten years to get it right.  Now, just three. 

 But in a followup, the BBC asserted “Key UN finding widely misinterpreted.”  Environmental correspondent Matt McGrath suggested that the idea that the output of greenhouse gases has to peak in 2025 “implies that carbon could increase for another three years and the world could still avoid dangerous warming.” But scientists he interviewed said this is incorrect—that in fact emissions need to start falling immediately."

The background: The world is almost certainly going to continue experiencing increasing incidences of droughts, fires, more violent and unpredictable storms in any season, and heat waves of greater temperatures and lengths. The effects of climate disruption we’re trying to avoid are so severe that they change the nature of places on the planet.  That's what this report is about.

 In BuzzFeed, Zahra Hirji summed it up:

 “The best possible future — the one with fewer climate disasters, extinctions, and human suffering — involves limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. But for this to happen, a new report warns, greenhouse gas levels must start dropping by 2025.

 “We are on a fast track to climate disaster,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said on Monday while announcing the new report by the United Nation’s preeminent climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“This is not fiction or exaggeration,” he added. “It is what science tells us will result from our current energy policies. We are on a pathway to global warming of more than double 1.5 degrees.”

 Guterres' phrase, “fast track to disaster” appears over and over in similar news reports.

 In the Washington Post, Sarah Kaplan and Brady Dennis wrote:

 “The world is on track to blaze past a crucial climate target within eight years, some of the planet’s top researchers, economists and social scientists said in a sober assessment Monday.

 Whether humanity can change course after decades of inaction is largely a question of collective resolve, according to the latest report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

 Governments, businesses and individuals must summon the willpower to transform economies, embrace new habits and leave behind the age of fossil fuels — or face the catastrophic consequences of unchecked climate change.

 “The science has been ever more consistent and ever more clear,” Inger Andersen, executive director of the U.N. Environment Program, said in an interview.

What’s needed now is “political courage,” she added. “That is what it will take — the ability to look beyond current interests.”

 The barriers to looking beyond current interests is suggested by the play received by this astounding news of an imminent slide to doomsday.  The top news was dominated by Ukraine and the incident of an actor slapping a comedian on stage at the Oscars.  The Washington Post story was pretty far down the digital front page.  So was the New York Times story, which valiantly attempted to play up the positive: “Stopping Climate Change is doable but time is short.”  Rolling Stone called this the “Silver Lining” in the report: that the tools to head off catastrophe mostly exist.

 Rolling Stone explained: If there is a single message in the WG3 report, Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M, told me, it is this: “Things are bad, we can fix this, but the window is closing.”

 But the story continued-- 

Unfortunately, that has been the message in more or less every version of this report for the last 20 years and nobody has paid much attention to it. But what’s different this time is that the urgency is palpable.

  U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the report revealed “a litany of broken climate promises” by governments and corporations who put the power and influence of fossil fuels above the welfare of the planet: “It is a file of shame, cataloguing the empty pledges that put us firmly on track toward an unlivable world.”

 Firmly on track to an unlivable world, Rolling Stone repeated.

 After the initial stories came the next day fatalism. An article in the Atlantic groused that a rise of only 1.5. degrees always was an impossible target. Grist soon agreed, and others took up the refrain. They did so in the context of continuing to try to cut emissions—that every fraction of a degree rise that can be avoided may help.  In fact, the "three years" in a sense is not new, and not definitive.  It would just make it very difficult to stay below 1.5 degrees by 2030.  But even 1.5 is a best estimate--no one really knows where the thresholds and tipping points are.  Just that they are coming soon, if we haven't passed them already.  

 A columnist in the Los Angeles Times despaired.  Why bother reading the report? Nobody does anything about it.  The LA Times initial coverage seemed to reflect that thought—all they printed on their front page was a box at the bottom, with the quote “Earth is on track to be ‘unlivable’—then a single paragraph with a jump to an inside page.  The more important environmental story on the front page was “Two Raptors Have Berkeley Enraptured.”

 It’s satire that writes itself: “Earth on track to be unlivable—film at eleven.”

 It took Mary MacNamara, the LA Times culture columnist and critic a few days later to ask in her story, “Why are we talking about anything but climate change?”

 A week later, the LA Times printed letters from readers under a headline noting they got far more letters on this climate column than on the Slap.  Many readers pointed out that her column was carried on the last page of the style section, while the Slap was on the front page—opposite to what it should be.  Many also criticized the LA Times for not covering Los Angeles climate stories, like the protests of scientists arrested in downtown LA after the report was issued.  A few days later a similar protest and result outside the White House fence forced newspapers to cover it.

  That the modest coverage of the report and its findings so far hasn’t actually ended is perhaps the only surprise. There have been followup stories on  elements of the reports and evaluations of proposals, such as nuclear power and the better known forms of geoengineering.

 Yet the context of this latest report is dark and daunting. The response to these UN reports is the least of it. This one comes as the commitment in Washington to addressing the climate future seems to be waning, and maybe even reversing.  The war in Ukraine could very well be both a preview of the future and the future’s endgame.  The darkness gripping the politics of America is extreme, and yet, it keeps getting worse.  Technology and politics are combining to not only ignore real information but to make real information scarce and close to inaccessible.  After just about killing off other sources of information, the Internet is becoming a cesspool of unreliable words and images. 

 I keep recalling the final scenes from the 2022 movie Don’t Look Up—a self-consciously final ragtag family meal in which the coming end is self-consciously ignored.  At the end of it the Leonardo DiCaprio character remarks, “We really did have everything, didn’t we?”  And then the walls implode.  It is an elegy for our Earth.

 Is there any hope here, on this Earth Day?  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: hope is a condition of the present, not a forecast of the future or even of future possibilities. You don’t have hope—you enact it.  It isn’t what you feel.  It is what you do.

 What exists right now are these reports—not the headlines, not the summaries, but the thousands of pages of what to do to confront both the causes and consequences of climate disruption. Countries, individual states and communities are using these documents to develop specific plans. Developing and implementing these plans will take work. Right now it is the most heroic and most important work there is.  Confronting and addressing the causes and effects of climate disruption will be the work of generations and entire societies for as long as they may last.  The hope is in doing that work, at every level.

Yin and Yang

Yin and Yang

It is spring once more in the Coast Range

 Warm, perfumed, under the Easter moon.

 The flowers are back in their places.

 The birds are back in their usual trees. 

The winter stars set in the ocean.

 The summer stars rise from the mountains. 

The air is filled with atoms of quicksilver.

 Resurrection envelops the earth.

 Geometrical, blazing, deathless,

 Animals and men march through heaven,

 Pacing their secret ceremony. 

The Lion gives the moon to the Virgin.

 She stands at the crossroads of heaven,

 Holding the full moon in her right hand,

 A glittering wheat ear in her left.

 The climax of the rite of rebirth

Has ascended from the underworld

Is proclaimed in light from the zenith.

In the underworld the sun swims 

Between the fish called Yes and No.

---Kenneth Rexroth

From his early wanderings (working in Pacific Northwest forests, hitchhiking across America, exploring South America on a tramp steamer and meeting avante garde artists in Europe) to his intense interest in Asian poetry and art, and his political and philosophical stances, Kenneth Rexroth in the 1930s and 40s was the prototype for the California poets of the 1950s and 60s.  In fact many of them met each other either at Rexroth's home or by other connections to Rexroth.  He was the master of ceremonies at the famous Six Gallery reading that introduced Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure and other Bay Area poets to the world, as well as jump-starting the Beat era.  He died in 1982.

A Better Metaphor

 People made machines that worked, and then made the machines into metaphors to explain how everything works.

 For example, the metaphor of the clock. It dominated the long era of Newtonian mechanics.  Everything became clockworks.

 Then the steam engine, the dynamo, and so on. The mindless machine and the Industrial Revolution is said to have called forth a mechanistic theory of evolution from Wallace and Darwin.

 In my 1950s childhood the human brain and body was a telephone exchange.  Then came calculating machines, and the brain became a computer.  A biological analogue was supposed to be the gene, with its digital off/on switch. It ran the whole show, even of change over millions of years called evolution.

 Once these images became less novel and dominant, the points where the metaphor didn’t hold became clearer.  Genetics turned out to be more complex, as did evolution.  And not even a telephone exchange is a telephone exchange anymore.

 Then in the 1970s, Gregory Bateson suggested a model which as a metaphor seems to explain a lot that’s left out of these other metaphors.  For these other metaphors were based on insights and techniques that enabled humans to do things.  Because they enabled humans to do things, they must be the keys to reality. But while they increased our capabilities, they did not necessarily complete our understanding, though these metaphors were seldom recognized as limited or partial.

 Bateson’s metaphor was also a kind of machine, one of deceptive simplicity.  It was the humble thermostat. 

The familiar thermostat includes three basic components: a thermometer that measures ambient temperature (for instance, in a room or a house), a dial or other device that a person uses to set a desired temperature, and an internal device that makes use of the different thermal properties of two metals to sense the difference between the desired temperature and the measured temperature.  When the actual falls below the desired, the device turns on the heat, and shuts it off when the two are approximately the same.

 What the thermostat achieves is homeostasis, which sounds like it means a stable home, and it almost does mean that.  Homeostasis is defined as a process to actively maintain fairly stable conditions. It is most often applied to life.

 When French physiologist Claude Bernard studied human internal organs and processes in the late nineteenth century, he theorized that they helped the body maintain a range of stability necessary for health and survival.  As this idea was confirmed in other studies, in the 20^th century this became known as homeostasis.

 Since then the principle of homeostasis was found to operate in other life forms.  Trees for example do their best to grow straight up, because they survive best that way.  If they get bent by wind or other forces, they do their best to compensate.

 So homeostasis is basic to life and evolution.  There are other tendencies such as competition, predation and procreation, and the natural cycles of growth and decay.  But homeostasis is the fundamental job—not competition or dominance. 

 Bateson used the thermostat model to make a couple of points.  In order to operate, the thermostat uses information, and that information is based on sensing a difference—in this case, the difference between the actual and desired temperatures.  Because it senses difference and responds to it, the thermostat operates as a system.  Those internal organs do the same thing—they respond to information of difference.  In the world outside machines, a system that senses difference and makes changes in response is called life.

 Bateson made his observations in the 1970s, working from insights derived from systems theory—called cybernetics—developed in the 1940s.  Also in the 1970s, scientists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela worked out their theory based on the self-regulating and self-organizing systems of life maintaining homeostasis—they called it autopoiesis (self-making.)

 In the 1960s, NASA had asked an atmospheric chemist to study the atmosphere of Mars, to help them figure out methods for an upcoming space mission to determine if there was life on Mars.  James Lovelock compared the Martian atmosphere to the planet where he knew life existed for sure: the Earth.  He quickly concluded that Mars could only be lifeless. Its atmosphere was static, dead. But why was the mix of chemicals in Earth’s atmosphere so dynamic, and so conducive to life?   

One answer was that crucial gases for life like oxygen were manufactured by lifeforms (plants mostly), and other gases were also expelled by the life they helped exist.  The Earth was a self-organized, self-regulating system, that kept the atmosphere in a zone of stability, which in turn kept life thriving.  The planet was in this sense itself alive, cumulatively taking in information and making adjustments to keep itself alive.  Lovelock’s friend, the novelist William Golding, suggested he call it the Gaia hypothesis, after the Greek goddess.

 Gregory Bateson, who lived just long enough to read Lovelock’s first book on Gaia, had already concluded that all life on the planet lived in profound mutual dependent relationship (“the pattern which connects”), or inter-dependency.  Life is a system.  He called it Eco. 

 Lovelock’s initial hypothesis was just an outline, until he met biologist Lynn Margulis, a pioneer in the study of microorganisms like bacteria and forms of fungi.  She could tell him what gases these organisms produced that cumulatively added to the atmospheric mix for life.  Lovelock had the “what” and “why” of Gaia; Margulis had the “how.”

In the decades since, the study of small and obscure organisms has flourished.  We now know astonishing things, such as the gases produced by algae produce clouds over the ocean which regulate global temperature.

 But Margulis and those who followed her are also showing the role of symbiosis and cooperation in life, right down to the level of the cell.  They have changed the accepted story of evolution.  Further, they have demonstrated another level of interdependence—how forests are impossible without fungi, and the human body could not function without bacterias and other microorganisms that live on and within it in symbiotic partnership.  This discovery in particular casts serious doubts on the ability of human beings to survive anywhere but on Earth, pretty much as it is. 

 The more that is learned about the natural world, the clearer it is that life on Earth exists because of a great diversity of intricately interdependent lifeforms and environments.

  At least metaphorically, Gaia works like a global thermostat; Gaia and Eco are systems of systems of systems, and they thrive by organizing and regulating themselves on the formative principle of homeostasis.

 Homeostasis on this comprehensive scale turns out to be the basis for some of the world’s oldest religious beliefs, going back well before civilization. Surviving indigenous beliefs around the world (and perhaps a few more recent systems such as Buddhism) agree that all life is sacred.  Gregory Bateson called this “the sacred unity.” 

These beliefs go beyond Bateson to include what he classified as non-living (while scientific study of exotic life since the 70s has blurred the defined borders between life and non-living.)  They say that everything is sacred.  That is what I believe. Everything is sacred.  The Buddhist principle of ahimsa—which Gary Snyder interprets as meaning “do the least possible harm”—applies to everything.  Everything contributes to the sacred unity, the homeostasis of the planet, and therefore deserves respect. What we do that may harm anything requires individual consideration, attention, intention and respect.

 Homeostasis is dynamic; it does not mean the absence of change, for life always encompasses change, including death, which breaks down one system and adds to others.  All the perennial mysteries and apparent contradictions still apply, within the sacred process of homeostasis.

 In cybernetics, the cycle of sensing information and then responding to it by making changes was called feedback. The technical definitions are quite different from how the word is used informally, but basically there are two kinds of systems theory feedback—the kind that supports homeostasis and continued life, and the kind that is a “vicious circle” or “vicious cycle”—that pushes towards instability.  The most prominent and powerful example of that is the need for continual growth that uses up non-renewable resources.  In other words, capitalism, and the mind-set that ignores its consequences and rationalizes it, even deifying it. 

 The ideology of today’s capitalism, and the power of those institutions and individuals that keep it dominant, is based in part on outdated beliefs in the always-independent single unit of life (right down to the selfish gene), the natural primacy of selfishness, the goal of “progress” at any cost, and winner-and-losers competition as the basic principles of life and evolution.  This results in the vicious cycle of infinite growth using up finite resources, of one lifeform destroying what sustains it and all other lifeforms.

 In practice, probably those who benefit most from this ideology in the short term don’t care what its foundations or metaphors are, or what it implies and causes.  But their institutionalized power helps explain why the insights of systems thinking, and the principle of homeostasis, have remained obscure for many decades.  This dominant ideology has so far blocked society from conscious commitment to planetary homeostasis.

 The outcome of these beliefs and practices of exploitation—never considering the destruction of the composition, diversity and natural relationships of life and environments as a cost, let alone a limitation or a suicidal act on the largest scale possible—is the Earth as we know it on the edge of doom—possibly even as the only living planet in the universe we know of.  

Today, 96% of the mammal biomass on the planet is comprised of human beings and our food animals.  Less than 30% of the wild animal population in 1970 exists today. Humans have destroyed mammal and marine biomass by a factor of 6, and half the plant biomass. Other lifeforms are severely depleted, including insects. The relatively sudden and severe jump in global temperature is on track to scour most of the livable land and perhaps water as well. Many scientists conclude we are entering a mass extinction event, perhaps larger than the previous five in the Earth’s long history. 

  Just as Gaia’s homeostasis is being crippled by the excess of greenhouse gases that are leading to the triggering of vicious cycles in the climate, other results of exploitation and untrammeled growth such as the destruction of habitat for animals and plants, the pollution and acidification of the oceans, are pushing Eco beyond its abilities to self-regulate, to heal, to maintain homeostasis.  The vicious cycle of a cooked climate could continue its dire effects for hundreds of thousands of years, not only destroying the current homeostasis, but casting in doubt the planet’s ability to recover enough for life to flourish ever again.  Earth could become Mars.

 Has our species developed consciousness just so we can be aware of what we’ve done and not done, of what we are doing, and not doing?  And what the consequences will be?  Or can consciousness still be a thermostat, that understands the information and acts on it to restore homeostasis, to preserve the Earth and all that is sacred and sustaining?

Man in the Landscape

Man in the Landscape

 (for Paul Shepard) 

 At Houghton Point I once thought

 to move through the woods without changing

 them, impossible, but to try,

 to reduce the flattery to a minimum.

 Will the flowers show themselves?

 It is the wrong question.

 Or take the landscape as a whole:

 there’s nothing you can do for a rock

 except at the expense of beetles and grass.

 Hills need valleys, lakes rivers,

 where does the landscape end?

                                        Everything 

wants to grow according to its nature.

Every place is itself a growing thing.

Where I am I am part of the place.

 Moving through the land I am looking for the

 land

 where my tracks will root and grow

 behind me.

 --Samuel Moon

 from A Little Farther: Selected Works of Samuel Moon

 Poet and teacher Sam Moon and ecologist Paul Shepard were friends on the faculty of Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, when Shepard was teaching a course called "Man in the Landscape," which became the title of his first book published in 1967. Houghton Point is in Wisconsin, at Lake Superior.

 I’ve mentioned it before (and will again) but it bears repeating in reference to this poem: Gary Snyder (who Sam Moon brought to Knox for a week that changed more than one life there) talks about the Buddhist concept of ahimsa as doing the least possible harm.  It applies to everything, but it is always a matter of individual consideration, judgment, attention and intention.

R.I.P.

 

R.I.P. Rose Severini, my Aunt Rose.  This is her wedding day, when she married my uncle Carl Severini in 1954.  

Living With Change

 

When the government’s dull and confused,

 the people are placid.

 When the government’s sharp and keen,

 the people are discontented.

 Alas! misery lies under happiness,

 and happiness sits on misery, alas!

 Who knows where it will end?

 Nothing is certain.

 The normal changes into the monstrous,

 the fortunate into the unfortunate,

 and our bewilderment

 goes on and on.

 And so the wise

 shape without cutting, 

square without sawing,

 true without forcing.

They are the light that does not shine.

 --Lao Tzu 

translation by Ursula K. Le Guin

photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson

Mariupol

Mariupol, a modern European city with historic buildings that survived prior wars, is by all reports a smoking wasteland, where the remaining population has suddenly been crashed through centuries to a state beyond medieval, beyond the stone age.  Perhaps the image is they've gone the other way, into the future of urban apocalypse.

According to the BBC, there is hardly a building in the city that has not been destroyed or damaged by Russian rockets, bombs and shelling. The city has been without electricity and running water.  Russian forces surround the city, preventing food and medicines from entering. Thousands of its citizens have been killed outright, and others are dying of starvation and dehydration, as well as wounds and disease, partly because hospitals have been targeted and demolished.  

 Hundreds of thousands of Mariupol citizens have managed to get out, but Russians continue to agree to humanitarian corridors and internationally supervised evacuations, only to bomb travel routes and machine gun buses of evacuees.  Others have been kidnapped and taken to filtration camps and across the border to Russia or Russian allies.  

This is barbaric butchery with modern weapons, and it is happening before our (averted) eyes.  We've seen the slow demolishing of cities before in recent decades, but mostly in more remote places.  Mariupol is a 34 hour drive from Paris,  26 hours from Berlin, a couple of hours by plane.  

When the Soviet Union blockaded West Berlin in 1948, a round the clock airlift by the US kept the city alive and eventually broke the blockade.  But the Soviets did not have nuclear weapons then.  And they weren't lobbing rockets into the city.

Most coverage of the war in Ukraine suggests that Putin has overreached, that he has been humiliated.  But a few observers suggest that his real target all along was eastern Ukraine and the southern ports like Mariupol.  Brett Stephens in the NY Times reports on a theory that Putin is after the considerable fossil fuel and other resources in the region.  This is a more sensible motive if harder to caricature than a grandiose vision of a Russian Empire with him as emperor, or Czar.  People were long perplexed as to why Hitler did not invade England when he was poised to do so, but instead turned to Russia.  But the answer was obvious to some at the time: Russia had the natural resources--the fossil fuels, iron, etc.--that Hitler needed to maintain a fighting force that could compete with what the US could build.  England did not.

Could it be, then, that Putin started this all by making a somewhat symbolic but very pointed rattling of his nuclear arsenal just before he invaded Ukraine, accompanied by speeches that sounded like the ravings of a Hitler-adjacent madman.  Perhaps a version of Nixon's Madman theory--make the enemy think you are capable of anything.

In any case, it worked.  The US and western European countries could be coming to the aid of Mariupol directly, by a thoroughly announced convoy taking food and medicine in, and residents out.  And prepare to give them air cover and military support if the Russians make a move to hinder them.

That the West is clearly not going to take that risk is understandable.  It is also, as Ukraine's president suggests, cowardly.  Of course the main responsibility, the essential moral as well as political crimes here, belong to Russia.  These actions in Ukraine have set world civilization back decades.

 The West not coming to the aid of Mariupol's people in such a direct way may be politically necessary.  But it is still a moral failure.      

This Week in American Fascism

 Culled from Political Wire in the past week or so:

“Federal prosecutors have substantially widened their Jan. 6 investigation to examine the possible culpability of a broad range of figures involved in former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election,” the New York Times reports. “The investigation now encompasses the possible involvement of other government officials in Mr. Trump’s attempts to obstruct the certification of President Biden’s Electoral College victory and the push by some Trump allies to promote slates of fake electors..”

“House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is threatening telecommunications and social media companies that comply with a request by the committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob, declaring that Republicans ‘will not forget’ their actions,” the Washington Post reports.

Former CBS News correspondent and current Fox Nation host Lara Logan said that “the theory of evolution is the result of a wealthy Jewish family paying Charles Darwin to devise an explanation for what gave rise to humanity,” Rolling Stone reports.

Robert Foster (R), a former Mississippi House lawmaker who lost a 2019 bid for governor, called for the execution of those who support the rights of transgender people, the Mississippi Free Press reports.  Said Foster: “The law should be changed so that anyone trying to sexually groom children and/or advocating to put men pretending to be women in locker rooms and bathrooms with young women should receive the death penalty by firing squad.”

Fort Worth Star-Telegram: “Should Texas punish abortions by putting teenage girls and women to death? Or not?”  “That’s the current debate in the Republican Party of Texas, where outlawing abortion is no longer a question of ‘if’ or ‘when’ but a question of whether to kill women for getting one.”

"Quote of the Day"

“Do not concede. It takes time for the army who is gathering for his back”— Virginia ‘Ginni’ Thomas, quoted by the Washington Post, after the presidential election on Nov. 6, 2020.

And one from TPM:

In public remarks, leading Republicans have almost casually and with little fear of political recrimination begun to relitigate same-sex marriage, contraception and interracial marriage. With a robust 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, the GOP’s ambition to rework the privacy jurisprudence underlying many of the civil rights gains of the last 60 years isn’t idle aspiration but a very real threat. 

Flame, speech

Flame, speech

 I read in a poem: 

 to talk is divine.

 But the gods don’t speak:

 they make and unmake worlds

 while men do the talking. 

 They play frightening games

 without words.

 The spirit descends,

 loosening tongues,

 but doesn’t speak words:

 it speaks fire.

 Lit by a god,

 language becomes

 a prophesy

 of flames and a tower

 of smoke and collapse

 of syllables burned:

 ash without meaning.

 The word of man

 is the daughter of death.

 We talk because we are mortal:

 words are not signs, they are years. 

 Saying what they say,

 the words we are saying

 say time: they name us.

 We are time’s names. 

 To talk is human.

 --Octavio Paz 

translated by Mark Strand

 

Octavio Paz was at times a diplomat and a teacher but above all he was a person of literature, with a stature and breadth not seen much anymore. In his lifetime—1914 to 1998--Octavio Paz lived, went to school and worked in his native Mexico, in California, New York and Paris. His many volumes of poetry, several plays and his many essays reflect the crosscurrents of cultures he experienced and studied, providing him with the language to explore and express their characteristics. However erudite and international were his tastes and knowledge, he wrote mostly if not exclusively in Spanish.

 I discovered him through his essays when his collection Alternating Currents was first published in the U.S. in 1972, and over the years I collected nine of his non-fiction volumes. Some of his interests and topics—surrealism, Native peoples of the Americas, Buddhism, contemporary film, literature in general—were shared interests, but I was equally engaged by his exploration of Mexican culture and history, about which I knew little. I was sympathetic to and excited by his approach—philosophical and poetic but grounded in the physical and place— expressed in dazzling language.

 His fame as a poet rests with his longer poems, but his major concerns also appear in shorter poems like this one—especially time and humanity.  Reading this poem at this particular moment, the unfathomable fire and cruelty of war in Ukraine and our human helplessness are brought quickly to mind.  Yet there are stories of impromptu concerts in basements and bomb shelters, and there is the solace of human talk.  

Paz was reputed to be quite a talker himself, which is evident from filmed interviews. That's him talking in the top photo.  Octavio Paz was awarded the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Madeleine Albright Dared Call It Fascism

 When elders die, they take with them years of experiences and the stories they derived from them.  Sometimes they take perspective and even wisdom.  Perspective and wisdom are not restricted to old age, but when they arise from experiences and years, it would be wise to respect them, and at least consider them. 

It is a lamentable commonplace that by the time elders have stories to tell, the young are not attuned to listen to them (except perhaps in cultures that honor such a tradition.)  When they were young, elders probably didn't extend their imaginations to their elders either, or wonder what their lives were like and what they learned from them.  

So it isn't surprising that the response to the death of Madeleine Albright is to honor her as the first woman to be the US Secretary of State, and discuss her accomplishments and typically mixed record in the 1990s.  (Although an elder's perspective would temper the temptation to call her--as some have--the first powerful woman in Washington.  FDR's Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins was the first woman cabinet member in history, and a major architect of the New Deal.  Halle Flanagan changed the arts in America from the 1930s to now as head of the Federal Theatre Project.  And in the 1930s and 1940s, Eleanor Roosevelt was vastly influential unofficially on matters within the US, and then officially she was a vital architect of the UN.)  

But Albright's accomplishments should not obscure the authority of her more recent work, and we would do well to take her more recent words seriously.  Yet we seldom do that for elders.  Upon her death, Jane Jacobs was justly lauded for The Death and Life of American Cities and other groundbreaking and standard-setting works on life in urban settings.  But her last book, of larger scope, was largely ignored. It was Dark Age Ahead.  It should have been read and taken seriously more than it has been.  It still can be.  The same is true of Jerome Kagan's final books on contemporary psychology.  And so on.

Madeleine Albright's 2018 book Fascism: A Warning was not ignored at the time, which was while Homemade Hitler was in the White House.  But I didn't see it more than mentioned in stories about her death and legacy, as if it no longer pertained.

But it does pertain, and not just to Putin in Russia or Xi in China, or the other regimes and parties in almost every country of the world.  Albright showed how fascism is based on unprincipled leaders, spewing lies they hope are popular, denying facts, feeding prejudices, willing to use violence to get and keep power, dealing with the world ego-manically, with absolute loyalty as the only test.  

This week the disgraceful Judiciary committee hearings in the US Senate fully illustrated all this and more. Righteously bellowed lies, complete contempt for norms of fairness within the committee, a scandalous lack of respect for a Black woman nominee, and particular support to the book-banning Know Nothing impulse of the fearful.  Right now the Republican party is the American Fascist Party.

We aren't there yet, Albright said in 2018.  But if these Republicans take over Congress beginning next year, and continue to create the conditions for unfair elections and right wing violence in the states, the US will be there: a Fascist nation.  

Albright's articulate and thoughtful words can't help but urge us to imagine what the current highly volatile situation in the world,  trembling on the edge of nuclear war, would be like if Homemade Hitler or any of his Cruz control twins were in the White House now.  Yet polls indicate that's what we're in for in 2024.

A lot can happen in two plus years, and even (one hopes) in the months before November 2022.  But heed Albright.  Ted Cruz and Lindsay Graham may be Washington's greatest senior assholes, and Mitch McConnell remains the epitome of evil, but the American Fascist Party formerly known as Republicans now have a deep bench of fascistic zealots jockeying for attention by trying to outdo each other in crudity and cruelty.

Albright's voice and buoyant spirit are stilled now, and may she rest in peace.  But her words still echo, and they still live in the work she left behind.

To observe the rise of "authoritarianism" in the world, or "right-wing" and even "conservative" zealotry does not provide the proper perspective.  Madeleine Albright called it fascism, because she'd seen that, she'd learned from her elders, and she knew what it looks like.  And that's what it is.      

The Dunce

 He says no with his head

 but he says yes with his heart

 he says yes to what he loves

 he says no to the teacher

 he stands

 he is questioned

 and all the problems are posed

 sudden mad laughter seizes him

 and he erases all

 the words and figures

 names and dates

 sentences and snares

 and despite the teacher’s threats

 to the jeers of infant prodigies

 with chalk of every color

 on the blackboard of misfortune

 he draws the face of happiness. 

 --Jacques Prevert

 translated from the French by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

 From an English language selection from Prevert’s collection titled Paroles (which means both words and passwords), published by City Lights Books. Jacques Prevert was born in France in 1900, and lived in Paris. His poems on the Spanish civil war attracted popular notice in the 1930s,when he was part of a political theatre troupe. For awhile he was part of the Surrealist movement but was ejected for being too anarchic.  His verses were passed hand to hand during the German Occupation of World War II, even before the publication of his first collection, Paroles, in 1946, which caused a national sensation.  His verses set to music also became highly popular in France.

A tribute to Prevert by the blog The Blue Lantern comments: "Abstraction, in words or images, meant little to Prevert who believed that 'everything starts from something.'  According to Prevert, if you paint a bird and the painting doesn't sing, 'It's a bad sign."

Prevert's parallel career as a screenwriter also began in the 30s and continued to the time of his death in 1977.  He remains an esteemed and popular poet in France, and is widely translated.

Top Photo: Jean-Pierre Leaud in Truffaut's The 400 Blows.  

Russia, Ukraine and U.S: The Analogy to Now

The Russian invasion of Ukraine presents us with a situation that seems both unprecedented and eerily familiar.  But what is the right analogy from past events, and what can we learn from them? 

One proposed recently is 1962--the Cuban Missile Crisis.  We are certainly being forced to think about the consequences of nuclear war again, and the US and Russia are in tense opposition.  But there are many differences.  This is not a direct confrontation of the US and Russia (or the Soviet Union) except perhaps in Putin's mind.  The initial dangers are in Europe, and European countries are deeply involved. If nukes are unleashed, a full out thermonuclear exchange between Russia and the US is not the first likely outcome.  We don't know--and I've seen no informed speculation--what the responses might be to various scenarios in Europe, such as chemical, biological or finally a nuclear weapon.  The danger ultimately is there, but at worst it is several steps away.  Otherwise there would be nothing else anybody would be reporting on.  Maybe.

From President Biden's point of view, it must seem very different from 1962.  President Kennedy had to deal with a hawkish military leadership that was dangerously quick to invite nuclear war.  That does not appear to be the case now.  Because it was a direct confrontation with the Soviets, European governments were consulted and kept more or less informed, but they were not at the decision-making table.  President Biden is working a coalition, because it is important that Europe be involved.  They are the edge of the sword, and the battlefield.  

Most importantly, the nation of Ukraine will ultimately make its own decisions.  If there was any doubt of that before, there is none now.  This is not something for the US, or even NATO countries, to decide on their own.   They must however now be deeply engaged in deciding specific responses to specific situations according to what Russia does, especially outside Ukraine, but also within it.

Another difference: In the USSR in 1962, Premier Khrushchev also had to deal with military hotheads, as well as the Politburo and the Central Committee.  If our simplistic reporting is accurate, Putin is a one man show, with no other obvious forces to either push him or restrain him.  It's hard to believe that's really the case, but that seems to be the unanimous view expressed in US media.  It's a little more believable after Trump, when no opposition within his party could effectively restrain him.  Now we have a number of Republican governors who operate as crazed autocrats with the connivance of their toady legislatures.

Because there was no actual warfare in those tense days in October 1962, President Kennedy was free to consider concessions that might give Khrushchev something, because he was preferable to Soviet hotheads around him.  This time there is a brutal shooting war happening, and Putin is increasingly isolated in the world, not only because of opposition to the invasion, but to the ongoing and increasing cruelty of his conduct of the war.  Nobody is interested in saving Putin's leadership; just saving the world from nuclear war, and saving Ukraine from more devastation and death.  The longer that goes on, the more likely some further international action within Ukraine will be needed.

So it's not 1962.  Is it 1939?  That seems a little closer.  A dictator invades an eastern European country, where borders and national identities are often in turmoil.  In 1938 Hitler's Germany attacked Czechoslovakia, and demanded its borderland, claiming it was really part of Germany.  It also happened to be of great strategic importance, but Hitler claimed it would be his only territorial demand.  That much sounds familiar.  In that case, the West appeased him.  In short order, Czechoslovakia ceased to be a country, and in 1939, Hitler invaded Poland.  The Second World War, the largest and most destructive war in the known history of the world began.  

This time it is Russia invading Ukraine, claiming parts of it, or maybe all of it, belongs to Russia.  Because Ukraine does not have official western allies--i.e. is not a member of NATO--the western nations are not bound to become involved.  But they remember 1939, so they are loudly and meaningfully opposing this invasion, and drawing firm lines for the future.  Though Putin may have had illusions of a Nazi-style blitzkreig, the Russian army seems capable only of blundering brutality and primitive siege.  

And let's admit it--all this has uncomfortable echoes of the late 1960s and 1970s in southeast Asia, as well as the US in Baghdad and Iraq in this century.  Putin is a war criminal, but some fingers should be shaking as they point.

So really there is no analogy to now.  There is no lesson of the past that absolutely pertains.  This moment has so many new features (what does Thomas Friedman call it?  Wired World War I?), and yet is steeped in some of the oldest conflicts, especially in that part of the world that has seen so much violence and suffering, that no one yet knows what it is or where it is going.   

Watching the Jet Planes Dive

 

We must go back and find a trail on the ground

 back of the forest and mountain on the slow land;

 we must begin to circle on the intricate sod.

 By such wild beginnings without help we may find

 the small trail on through the buffalo-bean vines. 

 

We must go back with noses and the palms of our hands,

 and climb over the map in far places, everywhere,

 and lie down whenever there is doubt and sleep there.

 If roads are unconnected we must make a path,

 no matter how far it is, or how lowly we arrive.

 We must find something forgotten by everyone alive,

 and make some fabulous gesture when the sun goes down

 as they do by custom in little Mexico towns

 where they crawl for some ritual up a rocky steep. 

The jet planes dive; we must travel on our knees.

 --William Stafford