Weekend Update: Slow Motion Coup d' etat and College Super Spread

coup d' etat: A sudden stroke of state policy involving deliberate violation of constitutional forms by a group of persons in authority.
--American Heritage Dictionary

Monitoring major news sites this past week or two yielded an increasing number of stories and opinion pieces warning about ways the Apprentice Dictator is trying to steal the election and stay in power.  Clearly he would try, but he's so ineffective at anything else that it seemed more a case of a media firestorm feeding on itself.  Until Friday.

On Friday night, his newly appointed Postmaster General Lois DeJoy--whose major qualification for the job is as a major Trump donor--accelerated the chaos he is deliberately creating at the Postal Service by ousting career officials from their key posts.  The Washington Post noted:

Analysts say the structure centralizes power around DeJoy...,and de-emphasizes decades of institutional postal knowledge. All told, 33 staffers included in the old postal hierarchy either kept their jobs or were reassigned in the restructuring, with five more staffers joining the leadership from other roles.

And if there was any doubt about the reason, the Postal Service announced it was raising the rates on mail-in ballots, tripling them.  A rate raise has to go through the Postal Commission and probable court challenges, so that even if it doesn't go into effect, it will create chaos in the system and confusion for mail-in voters.  DeJoy had already slowed mail delivery and caused confusion within the Postal Service with earlier efforts.

Meanwhile the Republican National Committee is suing a number of states to prevent mail-in ballots, and though the suits are often of comic opera quality, they also add to the chaos.  And reportedly Homegrown Hitler is considering (i.e. threatening) some sort of executive action to curtail mail-in voting.

These efforts and their results, plus other methods of confusing and limiting in-person voting by Democrats, could make come true what otherwise seems like an overblown scare headline scenario outlined by the New York Times:

Florida 2000

“Imagine not just another Florida, but a dozen Floridas. Not just one set of lawsuits but a vast array of them. And instead of two restrained candidates staying out of sight and leaving the fight to surrogates, a sitting president of the United States unleashing ALL CAPS Twitter blasts from the Oval Office while seeking ways to use the power of his office to intervene.”

“The possibility of an ugly November — and perhaps even December and January — has emerged more starkly in recent days as President Trump complains that the election will be rigged and Democrats accuse him of trying to make that a self-fulfilling prophesy.”

This is what the White House is concentrating on, as hundreds of thousands of Americans suffer and die from Covid, and hundreds of millions suffer the effects of the Covid Crisis, which the White House has decided to ignore.

This in the same week in which the White House refused to deal with Democrats to prevent the economy from collapsing and even more people suffering by re-instituting expanded unemployment payments and protecting renters.  Democrats also want to fund the states' efforts to deal as effectively as they can without a unified federal effort to deal with the covid crisis, and fund the Post Office and other efforts to insure voters' ability to participate in a safe election.  Instead the Apprentice Dictator dictated so-called executive orders which were either deceptive and meaningless, or illegal, unconstitutional and unlikely to offer any real relief, while threatening Social Security and Medicare by cutting the payroll taxes that partially fund them.  

The surest way to defeat these White House and Republican efforts to subvert the election is for Joe Biden and Democratic congressional candidates to end Election Day with unbeatable leads by virtue of in-person voting and whatever other votes are counted when the day's counts are announced.  I still think this is possible and maybe even likely to happen.  But it is also far from certain.

What becomes very clear now, if it hasn't been before, is that this is not politics as usual, or even politics at all.  It is a series of attacks on constitutional forms that fully qualifies as a slow motion coup d' 'etat.   If Trump retains power under these conditions, the United States would de facto and without question be governed by a dictatorship.

So add that to possible treason in the past and still ongoing collusion with Russia and other foreign interests in perverting an American election, and rampant corruption--just last week, when it was suggested that Trump might make his acceptance speech from the White House--already flirting with legal violations as well as ethical norms--his company just happen to triple the room rates at his Washington hotel for the week he would make this speech.  If these efforts at a slow motion coup are unsuccessful, then those responsible for it must be held to account to the full extent of the law.

Cancel College (Are You Listening, HSU?)

Cancel College is the title of a piece in the Atlantic, subtitled Reopening universities will accomplish little and endanger many, by contributing writer Yascha Mounk:

Noting that many colleges will be bringing students back in the next few weeks, "if colleges go ahead, they will endanger the lives of students, staff, faculty, and those who live in the surrounding communities. Reopening colleges is the wrong thing to do." Noting that many universities have come up with innovative plans to respond to the Covid crisis dangers, But these plans all founder on the same basic problem: Most college students are at an age when the urge to socialize is especially strong. Whatever the rules may say, young people will have parties, hook up, and leave campus to have fun."

"And the consequences if—or rather when—the coronavirus starts to spread will probably be disastrous. As a Harvard University official told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell back in March, “The dorms are cruise ships.” Even if sophisticated testing uncovers a case of COVID-19 within a few days of a student contracting it, that student is likely to have come into contact with dozens of others in the intervening days."

And here is the point I've been trying to make about Humboldt State University (where, by the way, there will be no testing) importing up to a thousand students into the city of Arcata, with a non-student population of perhaps 7,000:

"If colleges reopen, kids from parts of the country with high case counts will, inevitably, travel to parts of the country with low case counts—and bring their home-state problems with them. This is why the biggest threat posed by reopening colleges is not to students, faculty, or staff, but to the surrounding community."

This is the chief danger here--students in the precise age group now harboring the most infections, coming from parts of California with much higher infection rates (HSU has recruited heavily in southern California.)  Most of them will live together in dorms, with many opportunities for super-spreading, while others live in the community, and they all socialize together.

 All this, despite the fact that there will be only a few in-person classes any of them can attend.  The California State system is entirely virtual this fall semester--only cash-strapped HSU sought and received permission for a few labs and other in-person classes.  Still, most of these students can do most or all of their classwork from hundreds of miles away.  They just wouldn't be paying for dorm rooms.

So it is astounding to me that this is not a local issue. No public official to my knowledge has questioned it. The local media, such as it is, has not raised it in any significant way.  Public Health and government have nothing to say about it, but then, they are never asked.

It is somewhat similar in other places, while the questions of whether and how to reopen K-12 schools has been thoroughly debated and commented upon by public officials.

Meanwhile, HSU students are already arriving.  I've seen clusters greeting one another on the street, none wearing masks and with no physical distancing.  What could possibly go wrong?

History of My Reading: Iowa City Blues

Illustration made in the 1960s depicting the Beatles as old men.
I cut it out of a magazine and tacked it to my inside apartment
door on Brown Street in Iowa City.  It scared me.

By the end of my senior year at Knox College, I was accepted into both the fiction and poetry writing programs at the Iowa Writers Workshop--one of only a handful to be in both, I was told. So I visited Iowa City several times in the spring and summer of 1968.  The first time I met George Starbuck, the Workshop's director.  I believe I had dinner at his house.  He wanted me as a graduate student, and was looking for ways to make it happen.

On one of my trips I found a way.  I talked to a university official who boasted that the Workshop used to get away with giving scholarships to whoever they wanted, but no longer.  You had to qualify by university standards.  At the moment I didn't because I was without a B.A. degree.  Probably on that same trip however I read through the rules and regulations in the administration office, and found a favorable loophole in the fine print: I could be admitted as a graduate student without a B.A. if I could take the courses necessary to obtain one by the end of my first year.  Technically that was possible.

George Starbuck with Paul Engle, who'd started
the Workshop. Photo taken some time in the 60s.

It took several more trips to gather the financing.  George Starbuck kindly arranged for a fellowship through the Workshop office, and I eventually obtained a government education loan to cover housing and so on.  So by early fall I was back, looking for a place to live.

 Knox classmate Barbara Cottral was at Iowa that summer and fall.  She was starting to spend a lot of time with an older student named John Bean (and eventually married him), who was either in the Workshop or knew people who were.  It was probably through them that I was told of a place that rented to a lot of Workshop and other grad students.

  I believe they referred to it as Brown's, but in any case my address was 414 Brown Street.  There was a large complex of inexpensive housing, and a major part of it, as I recall it, was comprised of old World War II era Quonset huts.  I remember walking down an unpaved avenue on a wet evening, with these high-arching metal huts one after the other on both sides.  I was taken inside one, and it looked pretty much like a metal-covered tent, housing several scruffy students.  It was indistinguishable from an army camp, without guns or uniforms but probably as much pot and booze.

I was looking for a cheap single room, and was shown one in a large, once noble but now ramshackle house.  The space was actually a porch added to the house and walled up to make a long narrow room.  One wall was of exposed brick--so envied and fashionable in more recent years, but the bed was against it and the wall was cold.  It was in fact the brick wall of the outside of the house.  But there was an extra mattress in the room which I propped up against the wall for some protection against cold and damp.

 There was just one other tenant in a nearby room, and otherwise it offered complete privacy. The bathroom with its pathetic shower splashing reluctantly onto dark concrete was at the foot of the indoor stairs.  Besides the bed, the room was furnished with a threadbare but comfortable old red chair at the long window, with a decent lamp.  A desk and chair were near the door.  I moved in, with my guitar, my portable typewriter, a Sears stereo record player, a reel to reel tape recorder made mostly of plastic, and at least a few books and records.  Classes began in late September.

As I've noted elsewhere, during these months I was preoccupied with my upcoming pre-induction draft physical, and then my induction/appeal physical. This involved anxious ruminations and inescapable decisions about my beliefs and my future.  Country Joe and the Fish set the stage:

Come on all of you big strong men
Uncle Sam needs your help again
He's got himself in a terrible jam
Way down yonder in Vietnam
So put down your books, pick up a gun--
Gonna have a whole lot of fun... 

Also as noted before, I somewhat helplessly split my time this fall and winter among Iowa City, Galesburg and Chicago, including a trip there when Joni--on a teaching semester in a Chicago public school-- was recovering from illness and (relatively minor) surgery.  As a result of these and other factors, some to be explored here, I was in a kind of perpetual fog.  That must be part of the reason that I have a few sharp memories but little more, of my time in Iowa City.

So I remember specifically very few books I read, or even had with me, in this Brown Street room.  Surviving letters home reveal I requested two books that I'd left behind: my Portable Thoreau and the first collection of poems by John Ashbery I bought, The Tennis Court Oath.  

Apart from periodicals (joined by now by Rolling Stone), I can conjure up some reading of this general period that were influencing my own poetic and fictional aspirations. The previous March, during my senior year at Knox College, I spotted a book in the Knox Bookstore titled The Liverpool Scene, which I bought (and entered the date.)  In the 1960s possibly the only reason a student in the American Midwest would know about Liverpool was as the original home of the Beatles.  Their success brought international attention to the Liverpool music scene, where working class bands were both a rebellion and an expression of the local culture.  I came from a working class culture in a provincial town in western Pennsylvania, not much like Liverpool but more like it than, say, London or Manhattan.

But I had no idea that the Liverpool scene included poets, and that's what this book revealed.  Along with an introductory essay, photographs and snippets of interviews, it presented the work of a half dozen Liverpool poems, most prominently Adrian Henri, Roger McGough and Brian Patten.  What especially interested me was that these poems were performed, sometimes in the same clubs as the rock bands, and often with band accompaniment.  There was also an LP which I acquired later.

The poems were lyrical--sometimes close to actual song lyrics--and grounded in Liverpool, populated with pop culture figures (like Batman) along with quick literary references,and an incisive humor applied to underlying desperation.  They often dealt with concerns of the times, like the Bomb and Vietnam.  The book's photos included one of a dark-haired girl with haunting eyes.  I cut that page out and added it to the wall display.

The poems included a short one by Roger McGough that became my favorite lines of 1968:

My Johnny joined the army
Deserted me without a care
He got shot to ribbons
Now I wear him in my hair

The Liverpool Scene paid homage to the Beatles but also to Allen Ginsberg, who had visited with the poets in Liverpool, and provided them with an extravagant back cover quote: "Liverpool is at the present moment the center of the consciousness of the human universe."

Alerted by this book, I noticed Roger McGough's name on the cover of a Ballatine paperback, which contained his novella and a cycle of his poems.  McGough was a member of the Scaffold, a satirical theatre group, and a contributor to the British satire TV series, That Was The Week That Was.  In the many years since then, he became a media and literary eminence in England, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

But the Liverpool poet who spoke to me most directly was Brian Patten, the youngest, in his early 20s.  I ordered his collection, Little Johnny's Confession from the Knox Bookstore, probably with my last library prize credit.  Patten has also had a long poetic career since.

By 1968 as well, this trio of Henri, McGough and Patten had their own Penguin Modern Poets volume, and in 1969, Penguin included them in larger collection of around 50 poets entitled Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain. That book features a long Afterwords by Adrian Henri, one of the older Liverpool poets, who provided a comprehensive history.  As the endorsement by Ginsberg implied, these poets were inspired by the American Beat poets and later West Coast poets like Kenneth Patchen, and more generally by poets who read accompanied by jazz players, and by other poets Adrian named who emphasized public readings, as well as by the Liverpool scene.

 I had been greatly impressed at Knox by how differently Robert Creeley, Gary Snyder and Robert Bly read aloud, and yet all expressed the essence of their particular poetic approach.  I was attracted as well to the relationship with rock music, performance and the general milieu of the Beatles.  There was a certain McLuhan quality as well, the participatory nature of the oral and including contemporary cultural forms and references, popular and otherwise.  I was, after all, a fan of T.S. Eliot and the Bee Gees, the French New Wave and the Smothers Brothers.

By the fall of 1968, the new fiction I saw was in an experimental phase.  I was reading Donald Barthelme's stories in the New Yorker, and Robert Coover and John Barth in a fantastic new periodical, the New American Review, which was published as a paperback book.  They were all experimenting in different ways with myth and tales, popular culture and fractured narratives.

Another writer oddly influential at the time was the San Francisco author Richard Brautigan.  He applied a unique, deadpan yet lyrical style to the reportage of the unimportant.  Like the Liverpool poets, he impressed with unexpected similes and metaphors.  Mostly forgotten now, his book Trout Fishing in America was a late 1960s sensation.

What Barthelme, Brautigan, the Liverpool poets and even Ashbery had in common, at least superficially, was a kind of literary charm--a sly ebullience, a youthful mix of innocence and irony. Part of it came from successfully responding to Pound's dictim of "make it new" resonant with the times, and from that came energy and delight.  Now this work is no longer new and its connection to its times less accessible, but there is still some charm in the use of language, and its evocations of human experience and emotion.

 But to me in Iowa City, it all seemed so distant, so elusive. One of the first conversations I had with another student in the poetry workshop was with a young woman who had been there for at least a year.  It was before the school year started.  She told me that most Workshop students played the game of influence. The point was to get the most influential faculty writers to pave the way to publication, to write stellar recommendations and otherwise advance your career. That's what the Workshop was about, she said, the name of the game was Career.  She said it without bitterness, as a kind of wry report.  I guess she could see this would be news to me.

I don't recall having any choice in my workshop instructors.  The big noise in poetry that year was Ted Berrigan (in his only year teaching at Iowa.)  Anselm Hollo was another.  I drew Jon Silkin, a somewhat older British poet not very well known in the US.  In terms of the kind of poetry I was interested in writing, Berrigan or Hollo seemed a better fit, or at least so I thought at the time.

Robert Coover (far left) with Workshop students in 1967

As I recall, the big noise in the fiction workshop was Robert Coover, then being published regularly in the New American Review.  I'd met Richard Yates at Knox and admired his work, but I think he'd just left the Workshop.  In any case, I was assigned to a workshop run by a writer whose name I have forgotten--that's how unsuccessful that experience was for me.

Given the uncertainty of my tenure due to the draft, and the fragility of my psyche due to ditto, I decided to postpone any qualifying math, science or language course until the second semester, and took a film studies course instead.  I enjoyed it very much, when I attended.

There wasn't anything about the Workshop itself I enjoyed.  I didn't make a friend or even an acquaintance in either of my classes.  I don't even remember how many students there were or anything about any of them in my fiction workshop, and I recall only one student in my poetry workshop, mostly because he symbolized why I felt so out of place.  He was heavy, bearded, with short hair, wore tweed suits, smoked a pipe and never said a word or betrayed any emotion.  Likely in his 20s, he looked much older.

I don't recall a single moment of that fiction class.  All I remember is my first one-on-one meeting with its teacher.  I was supposed to bring 20 pages of fresh writing to it, which I did.  All I recall being said was that I should return next time with 20 more.  This is not a bad approach for instructing a young writer, but given my psychological state, that 20 pages had cost just about all I had.  Absent anything else to go on, I didn't see how to proceed.

In my poetry workshop I liked the teacher Jon Silkin, but I couldn't stand my basically comatose fellow students.  They seemed a staid and self-satisfied, wary, small-minded and highly traditional bunch.  If I had mentioned the Liverpool poets, I was sure, they would have only stared.  But then, that's all I ever saw them do anyway.

Silkin might actually have felt the same way about them. The only moment in class I recall was Silkin asking for a volunteer to read a particular poem aloud.  No one did.  Clearly annoyed, he slid the book across the table to me.  It felt like a challenge, like the coach throwing me the ball, daring me to sink the shot.

I don't remember the poet or the poem, though I do recall it had some French in it. Though it was by an established author,  I'd never read the poem before.  But I surprised no one more than myself by reading it perfectly, including the French.  "You read that with real feeling," Silkin said, with some wonder.  I was embarrassed because the feelings I may have expressed had little to do with the content of the poem.

But the moment that summarizes my Workshop experience came later, on the day when a group of my poems were going to be discussed by the class.  I had deliberately submitted my most daring verses, the craziest ones, including one that ran all over the page, rather than the ones I felt might be the best.  I arrived for that day's class a bit early, and stopped in the nearest men's room to gather myself for the battle.  That one particular fellow student, the bearded pipe-smoker, was also in the men's room.  I smiled at him reflexively.  He looked at me, said nothing, and left.

I proceeded to our assigned classroom, which I saw was empty.  I had somehow confused the start time.  In fact, the class was just over.  I had missed the discussion of my own poems.

Immediately I thought of the pipe-smoker, and how he must have thought I had been too scared to attend this class and had been hiding out in the men's room.  Yet, the worst of it was that he didn't say a word to me.  And all of that said everything to me about my experience at the Workshop.  I don't think I ever went back.

Kenney's bar, the historic Workshop hangout

When I first arrived in Iowa City, I was told the name and location of the bar favored by Workshop students. For decades it had been a place called Kenney's.  I don't think it was the bar I was directed to, though it could have been.  In any case, on my visits to this bar I did see people from the Workshop, including Ted Berrigan, looking like a member of Hell's Angels.  People typically drank beer, ordered in pitchers.  It was pretty lousy, watery beer.  "Born To Be Wild" played on the jukebox repeatedly.  It seemed to be the bar's theme song, expressing the hippie biker ambiance.

Most of the faculty and most of the students were male.  I am not given to a generalized condemnation of the gender I belong to, but it felt oppressive. In any case, for whatever reasons, I was steadily unhappy there.  My notebooks of this period contain almost nothing about my experiences with the Workshop or even in Iowa City--just endless notes for the fiction I wasn't writing.  But there is one scribbled note on a scrap of paper that has somehow survived.  I don't know when I wrote it, but it recorded a moment in that bar, with my glass of  tasteless beer sitting on the pinball machine, fighting off the feeling that I didn't like pinball, or the taste of this beer, or this bar.  "I stood there, with that layer of heat on my skin, trying to like it all."  I failed.

U of Iowa campus 1968

I remember the cold days--even though I was also there in a sunny fall, I remember Iowa City as cold and snow-covered-- going to campus, negotiating the winding pedestrian bridge, sitting with my coffee in the student union that connected buildings, and occasionally seeing one of the few people I knew.  I remember the coffee shop where I sat at the counter and had my pork tenderloin sandwich and coffee before a class, listening to the Moody Blues "Tuesday Afternoon" on the jukebox.  The only social occasion I recall was at Valjean McClenighan's apartment (after graduating Knox a year before me, she entered Iowa's theatre program), where she made me dinner, but which regrettably found me in my characteristic distracted graceless fog.

Otherwise, when I was in Iowa City, I was in my room.  I only remember two of the books I read there.  At the University bookstore I bought a just-published hardback, the first legitimate book about the Beatles, Hunter Davies' The Beatles: A Biography.

And when that wasn't enough to keep me in their world, I found cheap paperback novelizations of the Beatles' films, and sat in my chair by the window correcting the dialogue--penciling in the lines I memorized from the movies when they were different from those in the book.

Other than that, I recall listening endlessly to the new Bee Gees album, Idea.  The Bee Gees were an even more private obsession. Though they would eventually sell more records than any group in history, at the time and for years afterwards, they were dismissed and derided--at this time, as watered-down Beatles.  (Even in the 1970s, my fellow rock critics smiled indulgently at my aberrational appreciation of the Bee Gees.)  I bathed in their pure harmonies, playful melodies, strange arrangements, and ambiguous lyrics with private applications. At least until the Beatles finally released their double White Album just before Christmas.

On the inside of my door I posted a selection of nice things people had said about my writing in official letters and reviews, as encouragement.  But I also taped up that illustration of the Beatles as old men, my version of the skull on the desk I guess, a kind of memento mori, and expression of suspected futility.

University of Iowa Bookstore 1967

Looking back, I made some big mistakes.  I should have confided in George Starbuck, the head of the Workshop who had taken a personal interest in me.  I should have sought out Jon Silkin for private conversation (for I would have learned, as I did later, that he knew the Liverpool poets personally, and they respected him.)  I certainly should have spent more time with Valjean.  Once she brought me to meet some grad students and faculty in the theatre department, and they were friendlier, more interested and more welcoming to me than anyone at the Workshop.  One of the faculty even asked me to try out for a part in a Pinter play. That doing any of this never even occurred to me suggests the weight of my distractions.

Occasionally I would escape to Galesburg.  The first time I hitchhiked there I remember walking up a city street from the highway with my duffel bag, wondering what I was doing there, when I saw the first person I knew.  I'm pretty sure it was Harry Contompasis.  Anyway, somebody who seemed happy to see me.  That kind of welcome declined on subsequent visits, as I became a perhaps too frequent visitor with no real business being there.  But still, I had people to talk with and laugh with.  And I think I actually did some research in connection with my college novel.  My notebooks reveal, by the way, my one good idea: to start it with the JFK assassination in 1963 and end it with the RFK assassination in 1968.  But that idea somehow got lost in the growing complexity of its conception.

Galesburg was often a stop before Chicago, where I visited Joni at the Del Prado Hotel in Hyde Park, not far from the Lake.  At that time it was mostly a residential hotel for students.  My visits there were also an opportunity to explore downtown Chicago and the lakefront, even in the cold, sooty wind off the Lake in winter.  Once on the L, I daydreamed my way past my Hyde Park stop and woke up at Stony Avenue, which I had been warned was dangerous territory.  But for some reason I decided to hitchhike back, and got a ride from two young Black men in a sporty car, who were discussing Zeffirelli's new film version of Romeo and Juliet.

This is what the Beatles really looked like in 1968, in portraits
included in the White Album package

I remember listening to the White Album with Joni and her very patient roommates, and I remember on an earlier visit, watching election returns in the hotel bar, smoking a cigar, my cavalier pretense fading when Humphrey came up short and Nixon was elected.  The assassination of Robert Kennedy remained a bitter thing, and for the only time in my life I made the mistake of not accepting that one of the two party candidates was going to be president, either the lesser of two evils or the more evil, and that I needed to choose. Now it was over and I knew enough of Nixon to know the war would go on.  I've been disconsolate on many election nights since, but on this one I was trying to hide a broken heart, even from myself.

What inflected all of this with a patina of the surreal--from Iowa City to Galesburg and Chicago--was its irrelevance to the upcoming life-altering moments of draft induction, and the decisions they would force. Sometimes I felt that to others, having this confrontation in mind was like having a cold--people might recognize it and sympathize once, but then they'd forget it: it wasn't their cold, they weren't saddled with it every minute.

My pre-induction draft physical had been in October, and my induction/appeal physical had been scheduled for early December.  I got a postponement to finish my Iowa semester. Eventually I had my three day physical at Fort Des Moines, and I was finally found unfit for military service.  But I may have already packed up and left Iowa City, without a word to anyone except my near neighbor, who was the only friend I remember making.  Earlier my mother had observed in a letter that she'd heard about a lot of things I didn't want to do, but I didn't seem to know what I wanted to do.  She was right.

Poetry Monday: Waves

Song

What if it's really waves, only waves
making their restless peace on the broken shore,
the lull between them like a held breath
before it's blown into air as music.
Haven't I always missed the ocean, the way its salt
buoyed me up inside the wet, the air above warmer than the water below,
the liquid line between breathing and not, so innocent, so permeable.
Floating there, over the deep, untouchable bottom, out past the line
the waves made as they curl to hurl themselves on the sand,
I could be far from the rinky-dink, the hullabaloo, far even
from the headlongingness of water rushing forward
and sloshing back, like desire,
going nowhere.
Over and over the waves break on the gleaming sand
while a gull diving in and out
of the perfect again and again
draws a thread between the air and the water
sewing together their beautiful blues
as if to mend the wounds of the world.

--Barbara Ras

From her collection One Hidden Stuff.  Her more recent book is The Last Skin.  Barbara and I were email buddies for awhile earlier in the century, when she was republishing Paul Shepard's books at the University of Georgia Press, and later when she directed the Trinity University Press in San Antonio.  Among her many honors as a poet was the Walt Whitman Award in 1997.  The Mass. Review has a nice interview with her from 2017, in which she names the ocean as a major source of inspiration.

Soul of the Future: Utopia or Oblivion

A continuing series...

Though H.G. Wells first articulated it for modern times, and the Bomb made it a real possibility, apocalypse as a story is at least as old as the Bible.  But so, too, is its opposite:the story of paradise. The western Bible begins with the Creation and the Garden of Eden, and ends with the Earthly Heaven after the Last Judgment.

As a literary form (as a tale in writing), the story of paradise on Earth is the older, at least in the form we call utopias, after the prototype with that title by Thomas Moore in the 16th century.

The form which utopias take has changed.  From an isolated and separated but nearly ideal society--usually on an undiscovered island or hidden land--it became a society of the future, or on another planet, or in a parallel reality.  These were all locations in 20th century utopian novels by, once again, H.G. Wells.

Wells also insisted on utopia as a better but not perfect society, and one that changed itself to become better--a "kinetic utopia" as he called it.

Utopian tales led to stories in which societies became far worse: a story form called "anti-utopia" or more often now, a dystopia.

For stories of apparent opposite extremes, utopias and dystopias are closely related.  Most utopias were motivated by what their writers saw was wrong with existing societies, the dystopias of the times.  Utopias were veiled criticisms of existing societies, especially when opposing one's own government and society was too dangerous to do overtly.

The dystopias of stories, on the other hand, were often utopias gone wrong.  Some dystopias were meant as critiques of fictional utopias, showing that instead of a better future, they were more likely to create a much worse one.  This also suggests an overall problem with both types of stories: one person's utopia might well be another person's dystopia.  This is also a feature of politics and the real world.

Some dystopian stories were in fact critiques of actual societies purporting to be utopias-in-the-making, at least partially.  Probably the best example of this is We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, critiquing features of the Soviet state. (Not coincidentally perhaps, Zamyatin also wrote one of the most perceptive appreciations of H.G. Wells.)  Dystopian stories may even describe a future that already exists somewhere, though unfamiliar to most readers.

Underlying many utopias and dystopias alike is the question of equity and inequities, which is a conspicuous factor in an even deeper question: what does it mean to be human, and how does a human society express that?

Many utopian and dystopian stories accented one particular solution or flaw, but in general both types of stories divided on the question of modern technologies. There are utopias based on the rejection of technologies (classic examples include Samuel Butler's Erewhon and William Morris' News From Nowhere), and there are dystopias or post-apocalyptic futures that have little technology left.  Equally there are both utopias and dystopias enabled by high techology.

Dystopias based on techologies are the most familiar.  Either technologies are too dominant in a wealthy society (Aldous Huxley's Brave New World)  or technologies are used by the powerful few to dominate a society of the many deprived (Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.)  Whether uniformly prosperous or a mix of elite and relative poor, technological dystopias institutionalize too much control, either by the machines themselves, or of the many by the few.  In all cases they lead to soulless lives, while ruining (or simply abandoning) the natural world.  A variation of this story is dominance by a particular technology, like computers or robots.

Too little technology can also result in the few who control what technology and resources survive, cruelly dominating the many.  The result is often a kind of Dark Ages model, of warlords in a form of feudal relationship with the downtrodden.  Various aspects of this model play out in, for example, the middle section of the 1936 Things To Come film as well as more recent movies like The Postman and The Hunger Games series.

Things To Come is also a classic example of another relationship: the utopia that comes after apocalypse and dystopia.  In fact, this movie contains three alternatives in its three parts.  In the first part, set at Christmas 1940, a modern city is bombed from the air, starting a mechanized war that goes on for decades.  No large cities had yet been bombed in this way in 1936, and these scenes eerily presage the London Blitz. The film's second section presents a post-apocalyptic dystopia, devastated and plague-ridden, ruled by a warlord called the Boss.  The third section depicts the building of a technological utopia.

Apocalyptic and dystopian stories can function as cautionary tales: they tell us what to avoid.  Apart from our frequent failure to avoid doing in the real world what such stories in the past warned us against, the dystopian mode is insufficient.  It suggests what could go wrong.  But it does not offer a vision to emulate, that  may serve as motivation in making a better future.  That's the job of utopias.

Wells wrote of utopias enabled by technology (though he also wrote dystopias caused by the misuse of technologies.)  But these utopias are perhaps more familiar as stories told in advertisements, promotional films and speeches on the glories of progress.  Worlds Fairs--especially the famous 1939 New York Worlds Fair-- can be seen as three-dimensional stories of utopia enabled by technologies. (The look of the Fair was influenced by the utopian city of Things To Come.)

For our time there is, as far as I know, only one major example of a utopian future enabled by technologies: the Star Trek saga.  It is known around the world, and goes far beyond technology itself, or any other such utopian story, to model and embody the process of making a better future.

Though the utopia based on rejection of technologies has its most famous origins in England, in its forms most relevant to the actual future it is characteristically American.  Even actual utopian communities (such as the New England Brooks Farm experiment in the time of Emerson and Hawthorne) were established based at least partly on this rejection.

But in a larger sense this utopian idea can be said to have arisen from the essence of America, beginning in the Elizabethan Age when the New World of the Americas was, to Europeans, the embodiment of utopia.

But perhaps the most potent myth for the actual human future arose in America at a peculiar historical time.  In the late 19th century, just as H.G. Wells was imagining his Time Machine in England, the United States was at the point of finally and tragically ending its uneasy balance between the land of natural bounty with the cultures that lived within that context, and the machine-dominated urban civilization largely imported from England and Europe.

It was the last moment that at least a few indigenous peoples existed in America with their cultures intact, in the final free remnants of their lands, in the same country that was building great cities of iron and steel.  The last clash led to the symbolic expression of the lost and future utopia of America called the Ghost Dance.

It is my belief, and the main thesis of this project, that both of these utopian visions are crucial to envisioning and enacting a hopeful future in our real world. That a synthesis of their best elements must be achieved to even have a human future.

For with the nuclear age, and now even more clearly in the climate crisis age, the alternate if interpenetrating extremes of possible futures have become a binary choice.  We will have utopia (a much better and more just society) or we will have apocalypse. Or as Buckminster Fuller said in the 1960s: utopia or oblivion. For not to go in one direction is to go in the other.

Our leading utopian storyteller today, Kim Stanley Robinson, has recently taken to commenting that our future prospects are so dire that survival without a major extinction event constitutes a utopian vision.  In other words, utopia is defined as simply avoiding apocalypse.

But even to get there requires extensive and even basic change.  To get there wisely requires imagination and evaluation.  So it seems to me still worthwhile to examine these two basic visions for a better future: Star Trek, as expressed in the initial or Gene Roddenberry era of its television and film stories, and the Ghost Dance, as it has been expressed since in the work of Leslie Marmon Silko and Ursula LeGuin, for example.

So next time, we start with Star Trek.

R.I.P. John Lewis

Because He Held Up A Sign (With Update)

“This rogue president is creating a much worse problem with his street thug army of uniformed hatred.”
Neil Young

Update: By Wednesday afternoon, federal stormtroopers had left Seattle and reportedly will be off the streets of Portland.  The Oregon governor said the police will have a new mission: to protect the exercise of free speech. This is presuming the federal stormtroopers actually do leave.

The Wall of Moms prevailed.  They answered the call: as one of them said, when George Floyd called for his mother with his dying breath, he called out all the mothers.  The Wall of Vets prevailed.  When the Navy vet described in Dr. Roberts report was assaulted by federal stormtroopers, it called out the vets.  And above all, Black Lives Matters prevailed.  Yet the actions and the damage described below cannot be forgotten.  

What follows is an account that was posted on Facebook, so many more people have seen it than will see it here.  Still, I thought it was important, and adds to what I've written on the subject.

These observations of what's been going on in Portland recently are made by Dr. Alden Roberts, a general surgeon who retired as Chief Medical Officer of a hospital in Vancouver, Washington, and just finished his terms as chair of the Washington state agency that licenses and oversees its doctors.  He is an eyewitness.

I have not altered his comments as seen on Facebook except to format them and highlight particular passages in bold.  I've also added media images from Portland.

[Dr. Roberts statement]

"1. The protests are confined to a 2 block radius around the courthouse, and if you’re 4 blocks away, you can’t tell anything has been happening. There is nothing going on outside of that region, and Portland is functioning as normally as the Pandemic will allow. It is not burning, nor is it out of control.

2. The protesters are absolutely peaceful at the Protests that I have been part of, and with the exception of graffiti, are completely within their constitutional rights to protest. The protests involve singing, chanting, and have used “white walls” to block whites who are trying to disrupt or corrupt the protests. Yes, cursing is rather commonplace. More than ½ of the protesters are white. All are protesting for Black Lives Matter, although the entrance of the federal paramilitary force has brought out a lot of people, including myself, who are incensed at the use of unregulated federal force against law abiding citizen and against the will of the state and local governments.

3. ALL of the protesters are wearing masks to minimize transmission of CoV-2. However, as at times there are 1000 or more of us, it is hard (though not impossible) to maintain social distancing. When the federal paramilitary force is deployed, it becomes impossible.

4 The Police responded unprovoked and were brutal, but nothing like the paramilitary force. There is a court order that forbids the police to use teargas. I was not there when it was just the police.

5. At the protests I have attended, I did not witness any unlawfulness on the part of the protesters. Each time, the federal paramilitary personnel launched an apparently unprovoked attack. There have been no “riots.”

The federal paramilitary force has had no training in crowd control, has no oversight, was not invited to Portland by local leadership, does not have any form of identification do not wear name badges, and wears military camo.

They are heavily armed with flash-bang grenades, less-lethal bullets, pepper bullets, pepper spray and tear gas. They will pull goggles off of protesters and spray pepper spray into their eyes. They used a baton to beat a US Navy vet, broke his hand and sprayed pepper spray in his eyes because he asked why they weren’t honoring their vow to protect the constitution. During the assault, he stood still and did not resist until blinded by the pepper spray, he turned around and walked away.

 The “line of mothers” on Sunday was gassed and shot with less-lethal bullets for chanting Black Lives Matter. At least one was pregnant.

 A protester holding a sign up with both hands was shot in the head with a “non-lethal” bullet and will likely have permanent brain damage. While I have not personally seen this, there are videos of people being kidnapped into unmarked vans by the federal paramilitaries as they left the protests, held for a couple of days, interrogated, then released without charges or explanation.

At this time, re-read my first two points. The protests are no threat to Portland and only encompass a 2 block area. They have been peaceful, with graffiti as the only illegal activity. They are well controlled and supported by a cross section of Portlanders. There is no reason for the federal government to be involved, and the excessive force being used appears to be nothing more than a political show of force against US Citizens by the Trump administration.

6. About 3000 protesters showed up last night (July 21); all with masks, very well behaved. Certainly no chaos, no violence on the part of the protesters. I left at 10:30, the paramilitary attacked at 12:30.

I spent an hour talking to the medics. They say they are being targeted by the paramilitary personnel. They are often the first to be shot at and tear gassed. When they try to help an injured protester, the paramilitary personnel throw flash-bangs and tear gas at them (they carry gas masks) One of them was beaten, dragged away from the injured person they were treating and arrested. They are from OHSU as well as Portland Fire.

7. The Elk statue was taken down by the Police to “protect” it, but the Elk statue was a favorite of the protesters because it was uncontroversial; so they got a blow-up elk and put it where the real statue used to stand. It’s sort of a rallying point."

This should concern, if not terrify, all of us. This is an unidentified and unaccountable federal police presence attacking American citizens who are not violating any federal laws. This is literally how the "secret police" in other authoritarian regimes began. The comparison to the early stages of Nazi Germany is NOT AN EXAGGERATION anymore.

Silence is complacency. Please share this post. Please spread this information. Please get involved. Do not allow or condone this conduct by our federal government. I don't care which political party you support, this is an affront to the U.S. Constitution and the founding principals of our nation."

[End of Dr. Roberts statement]

I can only add that we can reflexively oppose unnecessary and unconstitutional federal force.  But this statement tells us what in this case that means, where it is happening.  It means among other things, the deliberate intent to cause pain and injury, and to prevent the injured from receiving medical care.

At the very least, no one in America should sustain brain damage for the rest of his life because he held up a sign.

Poetry Monday: Karma Repair Kit

Karma Repair Kit: Items 1-4

1. Get enough food to eat,
    and eat it.

2. Find a place to sleep where it is quiet,
    and sleep there.

3. Reduce intellectual and emotional noise
    until you arrive at the silence of yourself,
    and listen to it.

4.



--Richard Brautigan (1935-1984)

The Wall of Moms

Update: Federal stormtroopers tear-gassed the Wall of Moms and other protesters in Portland on Wednesday, including Portland's Mayor.  The fight goes on.

Homegrown Hitler has deployed his Gestapo on the streets of Portland, Oregon, and threatens to do so in Chicago and other cities, which coincidentally have Democratic mayors.  His Secret Police--with no identification or official uniform and tooling around in unmarked vehicles, is apparently comprised of elements of ICE, Border Patrol and other unrelated employees of Homeland Security, commanded by acting Secretary Chad Wolf, whose claim to fame is as the architect of the current administration's family separation policy(which by the way was ruled illegal but still continues.)

The presence of these forces is causing rather than defusing conflict.  And surely by coincidence as well, footage of the resulting conflict is showing up in Trump campaign ads.  (As are scenes of street violence purporting to be in America now but are stock shots of violence in another year and another country.)

These official thugs have been seen pulling people off the street and into those vans, and were photographed beating an actual US military veteran who wanted to ask them a question: do you think what you are doing is constitutional?

Journalists have called attention to it.  "Can we call it fascism yet?" a columnist asked.  Politicians have criticized it, including the very first Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, a Republican, who did not mince words. “The department was established to protect America from the ever-present threat of global terrorism. It was not established to be the president’s personal militia.”

But these are words, and notable as they are, talk moves on.  (Family separations, no longer talked about, still happen.)  Doing something about it has fallen to, as usual, Mom.

Writes the Guardian:

"The chief financial officer for tech startups in Oregon’s biggest city joined hundreds of other mothers dressed in yellow in a “Wall of Moms”, turning out each evening to stand as a human barricade between protesters and agents dispatched by Donald Trump to aggressively break up Black Lives Matter demonstrations."

"What began as a small symbolic act of defiance on Saturday grew into the principal demonstration two nights later, as thousands packed the streets and squares outside the county jail and federal courthouse in downtown Portland for one of the largest protests to date.

At the heart of it were hundreds of women dressed in yellow and singing “Hands up, please don’t shoot me” – evidence that not only has Trump’s dispatch of federal agents failed to stop the protests, it has reinvigorated them."

The Wall of Moms began with 40 mothers in white.

Their line offered little protection once the federal officers started firing teargas and flash-bangs and charging with batons. But they were back in larger numbers the following evening, this time wearing yellow and carrying sunflowers. By Monday, the Wall of Moms had become the main event as Ullman and hundreds of others decided this was the moment to make a stand."

This is what it takes.  This is the hope to end this now.

Poetry Monday: Hay for the Horses

Hay for the Horses

He had driven half the night
From far down San Joaquin
Through Mariposa, up the
Dangerous mountain roads,
And pulled in at eight a.m.
With his big truckload of hay
         behind the barn.
With winch and ropes and hooks
We stacked the bales up clean
To splintery redwood rafters.
High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa
Whirling through shingle-cracks of light,
Itch of haydust in the
                  sweaty shirt and shoes.
At lunchtime under Black oak
Out in the hot corral,
--The old mare nosing lunchpails,
Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds--
"I'm sixty-eight" he said,
"I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.
I thought, the day I started,
I sure would hate to do this all my life.
And dammit, that's just what
I've gone and done."

--Gary Snyder

  I first heard Gary Snyder read this poem as part of a sequence in the 1960s.  You can see and hear him read it in the documentary film, "The Practice of the Wild," which is included as a DVD with the book The Etiquette of Freedom. Gary Snyder turned 90 in May. 

Weekend Update: Getting Through It

“Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.”

R.I.P John Lewis, activist and member of Congress (1940-2020)


Amidst strangely hopeful news for the future, another week of the ominous present.  But we got through it.

Another week of the same headline repeated every day: record number of Covid 19 infections, hospitalizations, deaths, in this state and that, and in the United States as a whole, doleful country.

"The painful economic lockdowns imposed in March gave the country time to flatten the epidemiological curve and contain the virus. But that window of opportunity, which came at great economic cost, is quickly slamming shut. Health experts say all signs point to a deadly summer and fall unless government leaders implement a much more robust national strategy." wrote Reid Wilson way back on July 12.

Obviously there is not going to be any robust national strategy out of Washington, and so the suffering and death and economic and psycho-social suffering will continue.  The best that can be hoped for is that the worst attempts to further damage constructive response will be blocked, and the people will deal with it, with leadership from wherever they find it--governors, mayors, community public health, Dr. Fauci newly freed to go back on national television to at least suggest guidelines for a common response.  But with hospitals stressed, and certain cities lining up refrigerated trucks, the potential for a firestorm of societal chaos by fall is still alive.

This week Paul Krugman among others warned of the upcoming end of the covid crisis rescue package's support for expanded unemployment benefits, which has effectively supported the US economy.  Congress has yet to act to extend it because Republicans have been balking. The national economy for the next years hangs in the balance, as do the lives of millions.  This is only one of the areas where Congress--meaning the Republican majority in the Senate-- needs to act if a deep and stubborn recession is to be avoided.  Some suspect that the most consciously evil man in America, Senate majority leader McConnell, wants that economic damage if it will hurt a Biden administration.   But I'm confident that if anyone can maneuver a deal, it's Nancy Pelosi, still the most impressive Democrat of them all.

The administration is trying to force schools to reopen, including in-person college classes, but their threat to withdraw funding from public schools turns out to be empty, and their policy to force colleges to offer classes or see their foreign students returned to their home countries has been ruled illegal by courts.  Still, it a heartbreaking mess, with no harmless choices.

Late in the week the news emerged of the administration's attempt to stir up trouble in Portland, Oregon with Homegrown Hitler's secret police kidnapping people off the street in what someone described as "stop and frisk meets Guantanamo." It seems to be a strategy of fomenting the violence that Trump claims is happening as Black Lives Matter demonstrations continue.  Apparently Homeland Security has joined ICE as Trump's Gestapo, although their outfits have been described as available on E-Bay.

Mary Trump sold a million books (literally) and made the media rounds this week, notably on Rachel Maddow.  For those who don't see the point of learning even more of what we already know about the madman, Dahlia Lithwick in Slate offers this:

  At bottom, Too Much and Never Enough may be the first book that stipulates, in its first pages, that the president is irreparably damaged, and then turns a clinician’s lens on the rest of us, the voters, the enablers, the flatterers, the hangers-on, and the worshippers. It is here that Mary Trump’s book makes perhaps the most enduring contribution to the teetering piles of books that have offered too little too late, even while telling us that which we already knew. Because Mary Trump begins from the assumption that other analysis tends to end with: Donald Trump is lethally dangerous, stunningly incoherent, and pathologically incapable of caring about anyone but himself. So, what Mary Trump wants to know is: What the hell is wrong with everyone around him? As she writes in her prologue, “there’s been very little effort to understand not only why he became what he is but how he’s consistently failed up despite his glaring lack of fitness.”

Later Lithwick summarizes Mary Trump's point: "Trump’s superpower isn’t great vision or great leadership but rather that he is so tiny. Taking him on for transactional purposes may seem like not that big a deal at first, but the moment you put him in your pocket, you become his slave. It is impossible to escape his orbit without having to admit a spectacular failure in moral and strategic judgment, which almost no one can stomach."

Those needing to escape from the relentless bad news should not look to shelter on the deceptively innocuous Weather Channel, let alone Weather Underground, which predicts a very hot summer for most of the US, followed by a warmer than usual fall.

Weather depends on climate, longterm and shortlived phenomena.  But this past week scientists concluded that this summer's Arctic heat (temperature passed 100F at the Arctic Circle) was "essentially impossible" without the climate crisis.

Another round of polls show further deterioration for the Re-Elect the Apprentice Dictator campaign, while that campaign itself is in turmoil.  The recently fired campaign manager is reportedly being investigated by the campaign for skimming a little too much off the top of campaign money that by rights should be going to Trump hotels and businesses, massive corruption in plain sight, the hallmark of this administration.

It is in this context of very possible if not probable Democratic victories in winning the White House and both houses of Congress in the upcoming 2020 elections that Joe Biden's climate crisis plan announced this past week achieves significance.

In an article entitled Joe Biden Is Campaigning On The Green New Deal, Minus the Crazy, Slate's Jordan Weissmann writes that Biden has adopted the key differences of the Green New Deal from previous Democratic policy proposals on the climate crisis:

"In the past, Democrats have wanted to reduce emissions through market-oriented mechanisms like a carbon tax or cap and trade... Green New Dealers have taken a different, less market-focused approach, combining clean power mandates that would force a shift away from carbon, massive government spending and industrial policy designed to create jobs, and a strong emphasis on environmental justice for communities hardest hit by pollution. Instead of putting a price on CO2 and letting capitalism do its magic, the new generation of climate hawks want to force power companies and other emitters to abandon fossil fuels while using the federal purse to put people to work and reinvent the American economy."

Biden proposes a program aimed at a clean energy grid by 2035, and zero carbon emissions overall by 2050.  He proposes spending $2 trillion over four years, and to previous proposals he adds "a “made-in-America” economic plan that would use gobs of government procurement and R&D funding to build up domestic sectors like renewable batteries and electric vehicles (there’s your industrial policy). And the campaign has outlined an extensive proposal to “secure environmental justice” by directing 40 percent of its climate spending to disadvantaged communities."  

Which is something like political genius on several levels.  It has the potential to give the nation a common purpose and commitment, beginning with another feature of the proposal (adapted, as several of these are, from Washington Governor Jay Inslee's platform during his brief but now very influential presidential candidacy): a "Civilian Climate Corps that would work on restoration and resilience projects, a direct nod to Franklin Roosevelt’s original New Deal-era Civilian Conservation Corps."  Besides mobilizing young idealists to do this increasingly necessary work, it means this program is addressing both the causes and effects of the climate crisis.

So I allowed myself to feel a little hope--that is, a focus for enacting hope through action.  I may live long enough to see a Civilian Climate Corps do effective work.  But even if the rest of the program is enacted, it won't pay off for long after I'm gone (except for health effects, especially in poor and minority communities, which is not nothing.)  But even if it turns out to be too late, knowing that we finally gave it our best try is worth something.

Finally, it's two weeks before the date Joe Biden gave for announcing his vice-presidential choice.  A lot of names, including new names, have puffed up in the media, with little credibility, and even less understanding than me of the political liabilities of certain otherwise worthy choices.   Right now however I'd guess that the top two possibilities are Sen. Kamala Harris and former Obama aide Susan Rice, with Sen. Warren falling back a notch.  Again, though, it's Kamala.