Blacklists Backfire

 

Walter Bernstein was a movie-mad writer who contributed to the New Yorker, before being drafted into the US Army at the start of World War II. He became a correspondent for the Army newspaper Yank, reporting from North Africa, Eastern Europe and the Middle East.  This led to a book, and a stint as a New Yorker staff writer. Then Hollywood called.

 Bernstein worked on a few movies before receiving his first screenwriting credit in 1948, for the timeless epic Kiss The Blood Off My Hands.  But his career was soon stopped when his name was named in the notorious Red Channels and he was blacklisted. 

 He was blacklisted—that is, prevented from earning a living by writing for the movies and then for television—so that his unAmerican views, such as his support for racial and economic equality, would not get slipped into his screenplays and thence into movie theatres and on television where they would poison the minds of impressionable Americans. 

 That basically was also why a lot of other writers, actors and directors were blacklisted.  And it worked, sort of.  Movies and TV shows became bland and fearful, and many of those who were blacklisted never worked in their professions again.  Some never recovered.  Some killed themselves.  But others survived. 

Walter Bernstein survived.  I met him and interviewed him in the mid-1970s, on a location shoot in Massachusetts for a movie he wrote about the blacklist, called The Front.  When he died a couple of months ago, this was the movie that was mentioned most prominently in the few obituaries or stories about him.

 The movie was a serious comedy, which matched Bernstein’s view of the blacklist itself: a comedy of the absurd, with tragic consequences, but also with redemption.

 In the 1950s, with so many writers blacklisted, the film and television industries had a big problem.  Not many people—or many they knew of—could write a good script that could be filmed.  So it wasn’t long before the industry itself began to subvert the blacklist meant to stop subversion.  They found ways to hire blacklisted writers and look the other way.

 Sometimes the writers were able to just use pseudonyms.  Some of those pseudonyms won Emmys and Academy Awards.  But especially at first, some writers worked through a “front.”  That was someone who agreed to pose as the writer, attend story meetings and otherwise represent the script, to pretend that they wrote what they didn’t write.  While producers pretended they didn’t know who was actually writing it.

 Some fronts took their new careers a little too seriously, and began making demands on the writer and the producers, apparently convincing themselves they actually wrote the script.  This is a source of the comedy in The Front.

 But other things happened to those who were blacklisted.  For example, the blacklisted actor Zero Mostel, who was in this movie.  He told us that the forced inactivity of the blacklist gave him time to reflect, to figure out what he stood for, and to broaden his artistic interests. For example, he did serious theatre, and he began to paint.

 Other things happened to writers as well.  Some got more serious in their work as well as their lives.  Bernstein would keep writing, using pseudonyms and fronts, but he was not going to be limited to Kiss the Blood Off My Hands.

 One of his first regular blacklisted writer jobs in the 50s was writing for the CBS series, You Are There.  He wrote it with two other blacklisted writers.

 You Are There had a unique format.  It was hosted by serious news reporter Walter Cronkite, who pretended to be reporting on moments in history that would then be dramatized.  Cronkite and other reporters would pretend to interview participants.

 I remember this series vividly.  It was an almost perfect format for school age children.  And so I learned about the Salem witch trials, the trial of Joan of Arc, the Dreyfus case of an unfairly accused Jew, the blacklisting—I mean, the trial—of Galileo—from this television series written by blacklisted writers.

 My impressionable mind was poisoned, it turns out, not only by Walter Bernstein, but by blacklisted writers who fled to England and wrote several shows syndicated in the US in the 1950s that I watched avidly, such as the Richard Greene series Robin Hood (which not only robbed the rich to feed the poor, but took on anti-Semitism and anti-immigration) and Sir Lancelot.  

 Bernstein eventually began writing under his own name again.  He and blacklisted director Martin Ritt collaborated on Paris Blues in 1961, starring Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier, Joanne Woodward and Diahann Carroll, with Louis Armstrong, about American jazz artists in Paris, with the Poitier character reveling in the lack of racial discrimination that haunted him in the US, and refusing to return.  Bernstein and Ritt collaborated again on The Front in 1976.

 Bernstein wrote the script for Fail-Safe in 1964, about the dangers of the nuclear balance of terror, and The Molly Maguires (1970) about unionization in 19^th century Pennsylvania coal mines.  In 1997 he wrote Miss Evers’ Boys, exposing the now-notorious Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, which gave the disease to black men but not the cure, starring Alfre Woodard, Ossie Davis and Laurence Fishburne.  As well as, of course, Heller in Pink Tights, The Couch Trip, and Semi-Tough.

 He even got to direct a Hollywood movie from his own script, though it was an affectionate remake of a Damon Runyon comic story: Little Miss Marker.  Then in 2000, he wrote a new live television version of Fail-Safe.  He was co-executive producer, along with George Clooney.  In 2013, he wrote and co-created the political thriller mini-series, Hidden.

 All in all, Walter Bernstein got people to laugh, to thrill, to think and to feel, as he went on poisoning American minds, for well over 60 years.  He was still working when he died in January, at the age of 101.

Poetry Monday: River and Sea

The Mississippi River empties into the gulf

and the gulf enters the sea and so forth,

 none of them emptying anything,

 all of them carrying yesterday

 forever on their white tipped backs,

 all of them dragging forward tomorrow.

 it is the great circulation

 of the earth's body, like the blood

 of the gods, this river in which the past

 is always flowing. every water

 is the same water coming round.

 everyday someone is standing on the edge

 of this river, staring into time, 

 whispering mistakenly:

 only here. only now.

 Lucille Clifton 

 I saw this poem in an anthology about the wonders of geology called Bedrock. I thought: what a find. Then I checked the Internet, and it turns out to be one of Lucille Clifton’s more popular poems. It was originally published in her 1996 collection The Terrible Stories. 

 This poem makes a profound point, but in fact the statement whispered “mistakenly” at the end is both false and true, another level of paradox in the human relationship to the natural world, both captive participant and conscious observer of time and the river. 

 Lucille Clifton was born in Buffalo and lived for many years in Maryland, where she was the state Poet Laureate. She also taught at the University of California in Santa Cruz. Her New and Collected Poems won the National Book Award for the year 2000. She also wrote a popular series of children’s books about the experiences of a contemporary black boy. Her poetry was often about black women. Born in 1936, she died in 2010.

History of My Reading/ To Boulder Go 1969 part 1

Fort Collins, Colorado 1969

In June 1969 Joni and I left Galesburg and headed west.  She had her Knox College degree, though I believe we left before graduation ceremonies. Our immediate destination was Colorado, where Joni would visit with her parents and her older sister, who was also visiting from Connecticut.  I had a bed in the basement of a house in Fort Collins, and then a space on the floor in a Boulder apartment. 

 Partly this was because I was not a popular person with her parents, or at least, they did not approve of their daughter being involved with this feckless hippie with impractical dreams and dubious prospects.  And long hair.

 But I also had a reason to be in Boulder: I had applied and been accepted at a summer writing workshop, officially the annual Writers Conference at the University of Colorado.  For even with the beginning of my disillusion at the Iowa Writers Workshop, I had no other direction or vocation. 

 Even after Iowa, I kept writing and sending things out to magazines, literary and otherwise.  I still have appointment calendars from 1968 and 1969 that record nothing but notes of poems or stories sent out on that date and to which publication, and notes on the dates when they came back with a rejection slip, and notes on the date I sent them somewhere else.

 In those days there was varied advice on how to manage manuscripts.  The accepted rule then was you could submit a poem or story to only one publication at a time.  Some counseled sending a story to “top markets” first, and work down to the little magazines.  Or (with poems in particular) start with publications that favor the style or subject of your work.

 I tried them both.  I wasn’t very skilled at either, and wound up trusting to luck and serendipity, especially when desperate, which was frequently. I was also easily discouraged, so after a few rejections the stories never made it far down the supposed literary food chain. 

 This was when you actually received rejection slips and letters, instead of an unwholesome silence, a judgmental void.  There was a kind of code to rejections as well.  A form rejection slip, usual polite but impersonal, was the bottom rung.  A note or a few handwritten words indicating your work had some merit was better.  A request for more, signed by an actual editor, was near the top.

 The best rejection slips came from a small literary magazine in the Bay Area called Kayak, edited by George Hitchcock.  Hitchcock, Kayak and especially the rejection slips have become legendary. 

The slips themselves used an arcane clip art.  Apparently the art itself made pretty clear when the submission was horrible. (Fortunately I never got one of those, but I’ve seen them now online.)  The others were funny—or as funny as rejection slips could be.  The one I prized did include a handwritten request for more poems, signed by Hitchcock.  (I came across it recently and put it in a safe place.  As soon as I figure out where that is, I'll scan and post it.  This example is off the Internet.)

Kayak published mostly poetry by the likes of Robert Bly and James Wright.  Hitchcock liked the slightly surreal—right up my alley. Though I gave up before getting a poem published there, in the fullness of years I was grateful to be among the near misses. And I was able to return the compliment by favorably reviewing Hitchcock’s collection of his own work in the San Francisco Chronicle, where I mentioned the rejection slips.  His editor let me know that Hitchcock, then in his 90s, had gotten a kick out of it. 

 But during that 1968-69 year I only got a couple of poems published in a really obscure magazine called the Riverside Quarterly, besides a fiction in the first issue of Knox’s new literary magazine Catch.  My first noted literary magazine acceptance was forwarded to Colorado from the Carleton Miscellany, for, prophetically, a kind of book review or appreciation of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five.  Check included.

 So a writing workshop in Colorado was another opportunity for what’s now called networking, and maybe learning something useful, if not about writing, then about the writing biz.  Besides, going to school was about all I knew how to do.

  There were several name writers who taught separate workshops over two weeks in June.  I was in the class run by Harlan Ellison.  He came from a different tradition than the writers in Iowa City, or the ones we read in literature classes.  He wrote for pulp magazines and now glossy and prestige magazines, primarily science fiction but also horror and erotica, sometimes under pseudonyms, as well as nonfiction of various kinds.  He went to Hollywood and wrote all kinds of movies and television.  He won lots of awards, mostly for genre fiction.  He wrote a lot.  He’d published hundreds of stories by this time, when he was in the early prime of a long career.  His formal education consisted of 18 months of college.

 Ellison was known as a rebel, a gadfly, and an aggressive adherent and promoter of New Wave science fiction, the latest revolution in the field.  He backed up his Civil Rights and anti-war credentials with a hip look and attitude.  He came into the classroom in bright colorful shirts of a unique style—maybe Carnaby Street meets Sunset Strip.  I remember especially the huge floppy collars with a kind of exaggerated Peter Pan collar shape. Or maybe the memory is metaphorical, for that was a major impression I had—that with his boyish face, his enthusiasm and combative energy, and his small stature, he was a kind of a countercultural Peter Pan.  Although at the time I met him he was 38.

 Ellison’s brash energy and entertaining patter in the classroom perhaps obscured as much as expressed his actual intelligence. You can see something of what he was like in his interviews with Tom Snyder on the Tomorrow Show a few years later, some still on YouTube.  (He was one of Snyder’s favorite guests.) 

 At the end of our first class he gave us an assignment to write a few hundred words on the old Reader’s Digest canard: the most unforgettable character we’d ever met.  I wrote about a fictitious person based on someone I’d just met in Fort Collins, although it ended with a surreal fantasy.

  I was still sleeping in the basement of a house in Fort Collins rented by, among others, the boyfriend of Joni’s cousin Mary.  One night Mary took me to a mountain encampment of some freaky friends, and I set my story there.  It was centered on another young woman who was there, and who Mary had talked about, but only vaguely based on her. The 1968 Roman Polanski film of “Rosemary’s Baby” must have been a hot topic (though I’m not sure I’d seen it) because the piece was also a kind of parody of the idea of an unusual birth.  It was called “Geraldine’s Baby.”

 I obviously had been to the University of Colorado Norlin Library by then, or at least walked up to it, because I used the motto engraved in stone above its entrance as a quote before the story: “Who Knows Only His Own Generation Remains Always A Child.”  But I took from it something other than the intended message. In just about everything I wrote, I was trying to express the realities and the points of view of my generation, and why we rejected the past; why we fought so hard to protect our innocence.

 Still, I wanted to live a life as a writer, and so I was of at least two minds—and about three hearts—about the writing biz.  I was repelled by the pretensions and fake preciousness I’d seen in the academy (and feared I saw in the mirror) but I had not given up the large ambitions. Still, I’d grown up on science fiction, and now Vonnegut and the New Wave writers were bringing contemporary ideas and approaches to it.  Besides, what fun it would be to be published in a pulp magazine!  So I was more than willing to listen to Harlan Ellison.

 These workshops were also useful as a way to evaluate where you were in relation to your peers, and to professionals.  I was pleasantly surprised that Ellison singled out my story for praise at the next class. But it also made me greedy.  Ellison had edited the New Wave anthology Dangerous Visions, and he was editing its sequel.  The next day he also praised the story of another participant in our workshop, and word went around that he bought that story for the new anthology.  I was determined to make that sale with my next story.

 At some point I moved to a more convenient distance, to a small but fairly swanky apartment on Cascade Avenue in Boulder, and a sleeping bag spot on a shag carpet in the living room.  My host was a tall man with a big beard and long hair named Bill Stage.  He had known Joni’s Knox friend Kathy, also from Denver, and he grudgingly agreed to let me stay one night.  But when he saw me he had the opposite reaction that Joni’s parents had—which was typical of those days.  Once he saw that I wasn’t a frat boy but another long-hair, he relaxed and told me I could crash there as long as I wanted.

 My longer story for the workshop was titled “Escape From Cloud Village.”  It was about a young woman fresh from college who tries to leave her planned suburb but it won’t let her—lawn sprinklers and hoses, faux antique lampposts, even her own car, conspire against her.  Looking at it now I see wisps of Vonnegut and Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone.  But it does anticipate in a way some of the suburban creepiness of my contemporary, Steven Speilberg.  As well as perhaps one way of looking at future events in my own life.

 The story earned me a one-on-one conference with Harlan Ellison.  I got a typed note from him on the same kind of yellow second sheet paper I used: “Bring this in to talk to me.  It is extraordinarily good.  And in some silly ways you can avoid, very bad.  We should rap about this one.  You might be able to sell it.”

 I don’t think my conference was his first of the day, for when I arrived Ellison was restless and a bit distracted.  As I entered the room he put a record on a tiny record player and began dancing with a young woman companion in her flower power mini-dress.  I didn’t know how to react to that, except that I recall I had the feeling that maybe he was trying too hard.

 I remember a sentence he complimented (“do you know how good this is?”), the word he said didn’t mean what I thought it meant (not entirely true, but he was right that it was the wrong word.)  He may have told me that the mother’s speech was too much like a speech—anyway, he should have.  And I waited for more but...that was pretty much it.  I don’t remember a clear direction or advice on publishing it, and above all, no offer to buy it for the second Dangerous Visions anthology. He was ready for another dance.

 So I left, dissatisfied. I didn’t know what to do next. I was pretty much where I’d been before the workshop.  More generally, lost in the big world, I was feeling the pressures of reality, though I fought them off.  Even as I knew my work wasn’t quite there, I didn’t yet have the experience nor the temperament to know how to make it better.  I rejected the uncomprehending, doubting or dismissive voices from outside, but their echoes were inside, and deep.  I mostly had the wild delight of creating, as I fought off the fear of a budding self or soul being obliterated. 

 As for my haughty hopes about the anthology, it would be several years before Again, Dangerous Visions was published. Scanning the contents, I don’t think that story from someone in my workshop is in it—at least I didn’t recognize the name.  I did, however, recognize many names, like Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury, Gene Wolfe and other established science fiction writers.  And a novella called “The Word For The World Is Forest” by Ursula K. LeGuin, which won that year’s Hugo Award and is now one of the immortals, as well as one of my personal classics.  It makes my greed especially laughable. 

 The workshops concluded with an outdoor evening of readings by participants.  It was an open reading, so I signed up to read two poems.  I didn’t get on for awhile, which turned out to be to my benefit. 

 The poems I selected were fairly long, and they were meant to be read aloud—in a way the culmination of my experiments at Knox and Iowa.  One was a sound poem titled “Notable American Fascists.”  Each section ended with a name that was well-known then, though mostly forgotten now, except possibly for J.Edgar Hoover.  The audience loved it, and excited the performer in me.  So I took the microphone off the stand and held it close to make the sounds into it.

 The other was called “Litany”: a form I knew well.  I especially remember the mornings in 6^th and 7^th grade we spent in the dark, cavernous Cathedral, drowsily listening on aching knees to one or another of the Catholic litanies intoned on appropriate days of the liturgical calendar.  I recall writing the first draft of it in Galesburg, possibly alone one night in Robin Metz’s house the previous summer, on folded gray-white paper that had been the wrapping of a book.

 My litany was full of word play and extravagant language, occasionally undercut by a joke (a series of tremulous long lines beginning with the vocative “O,” then undercut by “O Christmas tree.”)  The point of view also resonated with the 1969 audience: “Alkaseltzer of the middle class, you O most mascara-ed of mistreated infants, of wandering and wounded species, instincts gone weird beyond recall”/ O blossom of the tentative, frightened flower!”

 It doesn’t hold up now, anywhere near the way (for instance) Ginsberg’s “Howl” still does, but it worked for that moment.  It benefited by being preceded by the hushed lines of short poems grounded in small, personal experiences.  My lines released that quiet audience tension in recognition and laughter. 

 But that was turnabout—for these poems on a page would likely have been met with embarrassed silence in a workshop classroom.  They were meant for this, for performance.  So it surprises me now to realize that this was the first time I read my verses in public away from Knox College.  And it would turn out to also be the last time.

 Towards the end of the evening, Harlan Ellison swept in with his entourage, and read a poem he’d evidently just written about ungrateful students who only wanted a piece of him.  And then he swept out.

 

Another memory of this writers conference is distinct and separate from these other memories. It involves a party.

 There were always parties connected with these events involving writers, and in those days they were drunken parties. This one was at a private residence. I remember two older writers.  One was the novelist Vance Bourjaily, a writer I’d read and respected (and still respect.)

  The other was a man I’d not heard of, and whose name I can no longer remember.  (I should say at this point that in searching for a photo for yet another writer at this conference, I came upon a newspaper story about the conference itself that provided his name, which led me to more information about him. But I’m going to stick to my original plan of keeping him anonymous. However, I thought I remembered his first name—and I did.)

 He was in his late 40s but seemed older to me. I remember him in a dark suit.  He was slightly built, though perhaps a bit paunchy, with a bristly beard. When I first met him, he was an easy, nervy raconteur with a wealth of stories and gossip about other writers, artists and actors—his acquaintances ranged from Robert Frost and Joseph Heller to Frank Sinatra and Jerry Lewis-- and especially about editors, publishers and Hollywood producers.  He’d lived mostly in New York in the 1950s and early 60s.  I was among a small group listening to him. The theme mostly was how corrupt the whole writing game was.  Good writing wasn’t valued, it wasn’t even wanted. 

He had done a lot of writing for print—mostly magazines but also books, and some work for film and television, often using pseudonyms. He claimed he had ghost-written popular novels, including a giant best-seller by a woman novelist, perhaps Jacqueline Susann. The manuscript was so bad when he got it, he said, it nearly drove him crazy.  It cost him more than he was paid to do it. He was funny, acerbic, and seemed to know a lot.  He was smoking and drinking all the while.  We probably all were.

 After the party I caught a ride back to campus.  I was in the front seat and he was in the back with his current girlfriend. I gathered that he’d been divorced several times. He was still talking.  Now the undercurrent of bitterness in his stories became prominent. He was drunk. We probably all were.

 There was a funny conversation in the front seat, so I wasn’t paying direct attention to him.  But I could hear him getting angrier, less coherent.  His girlfriend was trying to calm him, but then he turned on her. He was nasty to her. That’s what got my attention.  That’s what made me resolve I wasn’t going to end up like him, even if it meant giving up this whole idea of being a writer.  I’m not sure all of this was entirely conscious at the time, but looking back, that’s the substance of that moment.

 It was only after I came upon his name while looking for a photo of someone else at the conference that I learned that he died just a few years after that night.  I don’t condemn his life.  He left children and now grandchildren, he had interesting and accomplished friends, he wrote for high profile publications and was by most measures successful.  But he remained for me a cautionary tale. 

Bourjaily

When we got back to campus, he was not among those of us who joined a few others in the dorm where some of the guest writers were staying. We were in some sort of lounge, and I wound up at the piano, thumping out the blues progressions that were very close to the sum total of my repertoire.  At that point Vance Bourjaily got excited, disappeared for a moment and suddenly returned with a trombone in hand. 

 I’ll never forget the expectant look in his eyes as he anticipated a mellow jazz jam.  He assumed I was an actual pianist. I wish to this day that I had come up with at least a chord progression to carry him.  I think I tried, but others intervened with their musical demands, the scene dissolved into chaos again, and in short order I left.  I was a few days shy of my 23^rd birthday. My sojourn in Boulder and Colorado was just beginning. 

Poetry Monday: Mad Old Men

Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad

Why should not old men be mad?

 Some have known a likely lad

 That had a sound fly-fisher's wrist 

 Turn to a drunken journalist; 

 A girl that knew all Dante once

 Live to bear children to a dunce;

 A Helen of social welfare dream,

 Climb on a wagonette to scream.

 Some think it a matter of course that chance

 Should starve good men and bad advance,

 That if their neighbours figured plain,

 As though upon a lighted screen,

 No single story would they find

 Of an unbroken happy mind,

 A finish worthy of the start. 

 Young men know nothing of this sort,

 Observant old men know it well;

 And when they know what old books tell

 And that no better can be had,

 Know why an old man should be mad. 

-- William Butler Yeats

Top photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson

Apart from a line or two, Yeats' 1939 poem remains apt.  In other words, still crazy after all these years.

Who Are The Martians?

 

Getting the joke of this cartoon probably requires knowing the basic plot of H.G. Wells'  novel, The War of the Worlds, in which Martians invading Earth are stymied when they fall prey to ordinary microbes here they don't have at home.  I post this today partly to celebrate the successful landing of NASA's latest rover on Mars.  It's primary mission--at last!--is to search for signs of life, even microbial life, that may have existed in earlier times when Mars had a decent atmosphere.  It will collect soil samples that, it is planned, will be analyzed by many labs using many methods when returned to Earth.  Returning anything from a planet has yet to be accomplished. 

I had higher hopes for this mission when I thought that returning the samples to Earth was part of it.  But it turns out not to be so.  The "plans" are vague, and the mission to do so is not yet scheduled.  If it happens at all, it likely won't be for another decade.  That's disappointing, because the discovery that life has ever existed beyond Earth, let alone that it exists now, would be so wonderful to experience.  I hadn't thought about it much recently, but I have come to believe that this discovery, if it is made at all, will be made some time in the next 50 years.  This looked like the best opportunity for it in my lifetime. Now it seems less likely.

But if some fossil microbial life is found on Mars, that in itself may not be the only discovery.  It is possible that evidence could help answer the question more and more scientists are now asking: did life on Earth originate on Mars?  Mars is much older and had a life-supporting environment much sooner.  Space rocks etc. are exchanged between the planets all the time, and some microbial life could make the journey intact.  Life arose on Earth suspiciously soon after the conditions were right.  Could it have been the blossoming of a Martian seed?  

And so the question above is asked again in actuality as well as fiction: who are the Martians?

Poetry Monday: Addressing Clouds

On the Manner of Addressing Clouds

 Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns,

 Meekly you keep the mortal rendezvous,

 Eliciting the still sustaining pomps 

Of speech which are like music so profound

 They seem an exaltation without sound.

 Funest philosophers and ponderers,

 Their evocations are the speech of clouds.

 So speech of your processionals returns

 In the casual evocations of your tread

 Across the stale, mysterious seasons. These

 Are the music of meet resignation; these

 The responsive, still sustaining pomps for you

 To magnify, if in that drifting waste 

You are to be accompanied by more 

Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon. 

 --Wallace Stevens

If  this poem is read as the title indicates, as addressing the clouds, then the "you" and therefore the gloomy grammarians of the first line are the clouds.  So the clouds "seem an exaltation without sound," which sounds like clouds to me.  

Harvest of Shame

 I haven’t had anything to say about Trump’s second impeachment. I had to force myself to follow the “trial.”  But the videos of the Capitol attack showed a persistent brutality that was sickening.  I've been in my share of demonstrations against government policies, including at the Pentagon in 1968.  I've never seen anything like this--this protracted inhuman violence. 

 My attitude towards the trial was summarized in a subhead to a Slate piece by Dahlia Lithwick: “The facts of the case are nearly impossible to take in, but worse is the knowledge that nothing will be done.” I preferred watching giddy clips from old Graham Norton chat shows. 

 And sure enough, on Saturday, the US Senate had its vote on conviction, its harvest of shame. Once again, Trump was acquitted of impeachable offenses he clearly and publicly committed, having presented nothing in defense, but depending on naked politics. Republicans quaking in fear of essentially the same mob whose stormtroopers viciously attacked unarmed police in the capitol (that mob including it seems the rabid leadership of many state parties), voted their cushy jobs rather than the Constitution or their country, which are consequently more endangered and less steady than they were yesterday.

 Some hid behind a vapid pseudo-legal argument with no substance, that because the penalty was removal from office, Trump could not be tried. This hypocrisy was headed by the master of hypocrisy, Mitch McConnell, who prevented the trial from happening while Trump was in office, and Saturday said yeah Trump is guilty but the Senate couldn’t try him because he’s no longer in office. 

 Those voting for acquital including the Senators who were essentially unindicted co-conspirators, who not only got to be the judges of their own case but advised the Trump defense lawyers, including the one who specialized in personal injury claims. Of these Tom Scocca writes in Slate: "The managers had to pretend Cruz and McConnell and the other Republicans were not complicit in Trump’s abuses, because their goal was to get 17 Republican senators to join the Democrats in convicting him. At trial’s end, only seven of the 50 members of the minority conference took the managers up on it. The rest of the Republicans didn’t care what rhetorical gestures the impeachment managers had made toward separating them from their president, for the sake of granting them independence from the president and his mob. They chose to stay bound to him. They are the mob." 

 If Republicans were nakedly and repulsively political, Democrats held back from making the full devastating case also because of politics. They could have called witnesses and put faces on the infamy, especially regarding what happened in the White House as the violence against the government was happening in the Capitol. But they didn’t, simply putting on the record corroboration of the story that broke Friday, that when House R leader McCarthy told Trump on the phone that killers were pounding on his door and threatening to murder the vice-president, and pleaded for help, Trump blew him off.

 So, apparently because one Trump lawyer frothed at the mouth and threatened weeks of deposition,  and because everybody’s votes were decided and they all wanted to get out of Washington for Valentine’s Day, and comfortably celebrate President’s Day on Monday after doing to the Constitution and the Presidency what some of the stormtroopers did on the floors and walls of the Capitol, a deal was made, no witnesses called, and the vote was taken.

 Afterwards a number of writers tried to find the bright side: Trump was damaged, the law enforcement apparatus and the courts could take over and now had more ammunition, etc.

 Among them was Atlantic editor and former GW Bush speechwriter David Frum in his Atlantic piece titled, It’ll Do. It begins by praising the “courage worthy of historical honor” of the seven Republicans who voted to convict, plus one Democrat in a state that voted heavily for Trump. He pointed out that a majority of the Senate voted to convict, with a small but significant number of Republicans. “It wasn’t enough to formally disqualify Trump from ever again seeking office in the United States. But practically? It will do as a solemn and eternal public repudiation of Trump’s betrayal of his oath of office.” 

 The Republicans who voted for conviction, Frum writes, destroy the argument that the vote to convict was partisan, and so took the wind out of the political sails. Republicans who indicated that Trump was at least partially guilty, especially McConnell, may have some weight with prosecutors and the courts, he wrote.

 Frum’s summation:

" If you looked to the U.S. Senate for a full measure of accountability, you did not receive it, of course. Donald Trump, the twice-impeached president, is also a twice-acquitted president. He lives in a palace on the sea, supported by unconstitutional emoluments from foreign governments, unethical payments from the U.S. Treasury to his businesses, and gullible donations from the suckers he duped. Almost half a million are dead from the plague he promised would go away by itself, even as he received the benefit of miracle treatments available only to the most favored few.”

 “But if justice failed, democratic self-preservation is working. Trump lost the presidency, and that loss held despite all his attacks on the vote and the counting of the vote. His party split against him on this second round of impeachable offenses. He has lost his immunity to civil suit and his impunity against federal indictment. The world is crashing down upon his head.”

 “The impeachment did not prevail. But Trump still lost.”

 Well, maybe. Time will tell. I’m not persuaded that facts will dissuade the rabid right and the state Republican parties from seeing this as rigidly partisan. Why start now? Trump’s response to his acquittal in his first impeachment trial was to double-down on wrongdoing—he was committing impeachable offenses every week, and didn’t bother hiding it. The wheels of justice grind slowly, and Trump has plenty of time to gather his forces before he faces prison. He may have little more than a third of the country behind him, but under the right conditions and the right moment, that could be enough. We’re not done with the danger of Homegrown Hitler. And now there is nothing stopping him from running for President again.

Soul of the Future: The Final Frontier

 

“Hope is a passion for the possible.”

 Søren Kierkegaard

 The characteristics of a utopian future suggested by the Star Trek saga are extrapolations based on dramas enacted as television episodes and movies (especially the original Star Trek series and Star Trek:The Next Generation, both produced by Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, as well as the first 10 feature films guided by his advocacy.) 

 Such extrapolations were made by fans and observers since Star Trek’s debut in 1966, and articulated by various participants in creating these stories. These ideas and ideals were and to some extent still are as important and well-known as the stories and characters themselves—another unusual if not unique feature of the Star Trek phenomenon. 

 An important consequence of these extrapolations is that many devoted fans not only look to the realization of Star Trek ideals in the future, they see them as guides to their own futures and their own lives in the present.

 But Star Trek is not a utopian blueprint. It is a saga of dramatic stories realized as television episodes and feature films that has an underlying utopian purpose. The need to tell these stories through recognizable characters in a visualized, walking and talking future can been seen to dilute that purpose, but it also provides power and persuasiveness to the vision. 

 Star Trek stories were different from the beginning. Following the main dictim of Lajos Egri’s classic text, The Art of Dramatic Writing (Gene Roddenberry’s writing bible), each Star Trek story needed a unifying theme. Roddenberry insisted the stories had to be about something. But they could not simply propose ideas. They had to dramatize them in recognizably human terms, and follow their implications to some conclusion, while the futuristic elements and space aliens provided enough distance to see these issues and ideas more clearly, without reflexive contemporary judgments.  These goals were not always met.  But enough episodes fulfilled this mandate well enough to produce provocative results that can still resonate.

 

As the original series saw its budgets diminish, episodes often became little morality plays, outer space allegories. The larger effects budgets of the Next Generation allowed that series to expand and illustrate, particularly in depicting the society of the starship Enterprise and the Federation. It more fully modeled the future it advocated. 

 Still, the same storytelling protocols applied—stories had to show how enacted ideals might look, and the problems they might encounter, and some of their consequences. Modeling the future included how these 24th century people might respond and behave.

 Star Trek’s basic storytelling move is more than symbolized by one of its iconic characters.

 As characters, the original series Star Trek crew was fairly familiar, from westerns, sea stories, previous space adventures and earlier tales. There was the heroic captain, as intrepid and courageous as Hornblower, as wily and curious as Ulysses, with a bit of JFK’s charm, dash and purpose.

 There was the crusty country doctor with a heart of gold, the comely communications officer, the steady helmsman, the eager young ensign, the frantic Scotsman in the engine room eking out his mechanical miracles.

 But one character was unusual, if not unprecedented for television: Mr. Spock, science officer and second in command. In many ways he was an original. He wasn’t the sidekick, like Matt Dillon’s Chester. He wasn’t just the brain who supplied the cool gadgets, like Tut to Captain Midnight. He wasn’t the antagonist either, the inside enemy who tries to undercut the hero, like Othello’s Iago. He was loyal, he was a friend, but he was Other. He was the alien, but on the inside.

 He was a different voice. Spock was half-human, half-Vulcan, raised in an alien culture, with different abilities and a different way of seeing things, including how he saw human thought and behavior. He provides a unique and different point of view, not captive to human emotional (also meaning unconscious) responses. In general, he represented consciousness. 

The stereotypical space alien is cardboard evil, and so alien Spock, like actual Others to any Us, is suspected and feared in early Star Trek stories. These responses were revealing, with obvious human application. Some acceptance of Spock led to the heresy that all unknowns are not therefore "things." 

 As played by Leonard Nimoy, Spock quickly became Star Trek’s most popular character. Nearly every Star Trek incarnation has a Spock-like character—notably, Data, the android aspiring to be human, on the Next Generation. And lots of other television series since, including those not set in outer space, include a Spock/Data character. (One way to spot them: they don’t use contractions.)

 Moreover, Spock as alien was not merely assumed—his differences were a constant source of dramatic and humorous dialogue and incident, a mutual exploration of what it means to be human. This continued as the character of Spock (and Data, etc.) evolved in response to events and experiences.

 Beyond the useful banter, what made the Spock character work was the relationship with William Shatner’s Captain Kirk. Their contrasting temperaments and styles added spark, but it was Kirk’s reliance on Spock’s point of view (and special skills) and their growing friendship that gave the series the ability to evaluate from more than one perspective.

 Illustrating the differences expanded with the addition of Dr. McCoy, who often represented the more emotional view. Together, Spock, McCoy and Kirk harmonized thought, emotions and intuition or physical impulse towards action; they formed a dynamic combination of mind, heart and spirit that some 20th century writers like Thomas Moore and James Hillman considered the constituents and activity of the human soul. 

 Though as half-human and half-alien (from the planet Vulcan), Spock was the ultimate Other to both races, his point of view was Vulcan, a once warlike culture that devoted itself to the rigors of what it called “logic,” avoiding judgments based on emotion. (This is similar to the cultural history of Tibet, where a warrior nation transformed itself totally based on Buddhism, to which Vulcan’s “logic” is closely related.)  

Through Spock, the viewer might see humanity from the outside. It is this stepping back that is the basic move of much science fiction and all utopian and dystopian tales. Seeing things from a different point of view is both the preliminary and the result of empathetic “walking in someone else’s shoes.”

 Beyond Spock, this point of view from outside is the key to many of Star Trek’s stories, themes and insights. While aficionados might be interested in specific episodes and films as examples, what follows is a more general outline, somewhat elaborated but perhaps still lacking in nuance, of Star Trek’s utopian vision, its contribution to utopian storytelling and to the soul of the future.

 1. Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations

 A value recognized from Star Trek’s start, the saga’s dramatization of the utility of diversity is now its most identified and (in more recent stories) most consistent feature. This is another thread woven by the Spock character, who championed diversity as part of his logic. The genius of Spock as a character was partly in the emphasis on him as an alien, for in 1960s terms he was not the only alien on the Enterprise bridge.

 Other characters may have been familiar, but not always the people who played them. As the communications officer, Nichelle Nichols was only the second Black woman to play a regularly recurring role on a primetime television drama (the first, just three years before, was the celebrated and recently deceased Cicely Tyson, in “East Side West Side,” a series about social workers starring George C. Scott that survived for only one season.)

 Black women had previously appeared mostly as servants, and that was also the case with Asian men. At one point in his theatrical career, George Takei refused such a role, and paid for his principles by needing to take a job as an actual servant to make up the income. On Star Trek, he was an officer, and the skilled and reliable helmsman, before later becoming a starship captain himself. 

 But while Spock’s differences were highlighted, Lt. Uhura and Lt. Sulu were simply bridge officers doing their jobs. Together they lived and breathed the point that competence is not race or gender-based, and that diversity adds to the available talents and perspectives. 

 Now that some previously unthinkable diversity does exist in professional circumstances, Star Trek continues to expand the concept. It is also arguably where its influence has encouraged a condition of our time, which is in fact the original Star Trek series’ future. 

 Leonard Nimoy often said (and he said it once to me) that Star Trek is basically about a group of people solving problems together. Infinite diversity in infinite combinations represents not only a concept of beauty, but the best, most practical chance for an actual future.

 2. Respect all life.

 

Enterprise discovers a tiny intelligent lifeform
that refers to humans as "ugly bags of mostly water.' 

Its conscious championing of diversity, and the relationship to the Other as a key to social evolution, became in Star Trek stories a commitment to respecting all forms of life and civilizations, and its grappling with these ideals in specific situations became its drama.

 It is a key as well to reducing conflict. “The continuing mission of the starship Enterprise has been to take us out of the smog of fear and hate into an open space where difference is opportunity, and justice matters, and you can still see the stars," wrote Ursula LeGuin. "Violence on the Next Generation is shown as a problem, or the failure to solve a problem, never as the true solution."

 3. We are not invaders-- we are explorers. 

When Captain Picard said these words (defining the essential meaning of what Star Trek fans know as the Prime Directive), he was announcing a profound change from most of human history, in which exploration led directly to exploitation and conquest. 

Science fiction writers like Ray Bradbury dramatized the repetition of this pattern on other planets, but Star Trek portrayed the implications of its reversal--and the temptations to revert. This purifies and exalts the human drive to explore and to learn, and through the exuberance of Captain Kirk and Captain Picard, portrays exploration without exploitation as joyful fulfillment.

 While the Prime Directive has been reduced in common terms to “non-interference,” it is really a commitment based on that respect for the Other as the respect for life in all its forms. Though Star Trek stories seldom explored it, this respect for life applies to our natural world—indeed, since most of this storytelling is allegory about Earth—this is its primary application: not just to other humans and their civilizations, but to the non-human on Earth.

 3. Making money is not humanity's prime directive.

 A future without money was sometimes played for laughs, but it is one of Star Trek's most subversive ideas: people will work to "better themselves and the rest of humanity" (in Picard's words) without being paid. Even though everyone's material needs are met (some have argued since the 60s this is entirely possible now, even without Star Trek’s technological magic), it doesn't lead to laziness but to liberation. "When you take away the need to make a living, a lot of other things are possible," said Star Trek producer Jeri Taylor.

 Our myth of money, which Lewis Mumford calls "the most dangerous of modern man's hallucinogens," was not present in all of our past. Sociologist Max Weber argued that the acquisition of wealth as an ethically superior motivation didn't appear until the 17th century. It doesn't need to be--and perhaps cannot be--in our future.

 Today aspects of Trekonomics are being taken more seriously, as concepts like the guaranteed income that faded after their late 60s and early 70s origins, are being advocated again, and the U.S. government took the unprecedented step of sending money directly to American citizens, with more positive than negative consequences to the economy. But the most important element is reorienting value. 

 4. The future is an adventure.

 When Star Trek began, this was perhaps its most bracing vision. The future isn't something to fear or to desire. It is not predetermined by fate or selfish genes. It is something we go out to meet, with heart, soul and wonder.

 "Back in the 60s, most science fiction was about people who weren't on earth because they were escaping it, it was so overpopulated and polluted that people couldn't live on it, or it was a charred cinder because we'd screwed ourselves over," explained Michael Malotte, president of an international Star Trek fan organization. "Gene's Star Trek was really the first science fiction of its time to show a future where we actually learn from our mistakes. We bettered ourselves and we banded together, and we headed out for the stars.”

 The cliche is that Star Trek offers an optimistic view of the future. It is optimistic in positing that humanity survives, but perhaps its greatest optimism is in the possibility that “we actually learn from our mistakes.” But that won’t happen unless we want it to, and are conscious of its value. Which implies the final propositions of its utopian vision:

 5. For a better future, we must become better people.

 

Star Trek brought together believable future technology with identifiable human behavior, but it also modeled a vision of the future where standards were higher, and struggling with ethical issues was central. "To be good," novelist Iris Murdoch suggests, "it may be necessary to imagine oneself good." Bigger challenges require that we fulfill more of our potential, or we may never get to that future. This potential is based on qualities we already have, such as courage, kindness, empathy, self-awareness and other qualities of mind, heart and spirit that when orchestrated result in what we call soul. 

 6. The journey out is the journey in.

 Because Star Trek's humans had to see themselves through the eyes of the aliens they encountered, they learned to value self-examination on all levels—as individuals, groups and as humanity as a whole. Star Trek also presented technology in human terms, another crucial connection, for the importance of technology is in how it is used, and technology follows psychology. In the Next Generation particularly, the roles of art, mortality and human relationships all became central to the voyage.

 "...space is not the final frontier," wrote Star Trek and science fiction writer David Gerrold. "The final frontier is the human soul."

 The Star Trek future has been interpreted in many ways, not all of them likely to be helpful to the actual future. And Star Trek itself is not universally accepted or taken seriously. It is met most often with either admiration or disdain, devotion or incomprehension. (Other science fiction utopians are themselves divided on the subject: Kim Stanley Robinson has little time for Star Trek, but as we’ve seen, Ursula K. LeGuin has praised it.)

 But it can hardly be disputed that Star Trek has penetrated global cultures over at least a half century. Near the height of its popularity and ubiquity in the 1990s, it was estimated that at least a quarter of the world’s population would recognize a photo of Captain Kirk. That’s more people, just before the cellular age, than had a telephone. Even today, terms like warp drive, prime directive, “red alert,” “beam me up”...are part of a common vocabulary. More people recognize Klingons and Vulcans than members of actual nationalities.

 So the Star Trek saga has been so well known and has deeply influenced so many people that it is the most important example of utopian storytelling in our times. The saga’s sheer number of stories makes it the most elaborated utopian vision of our age.

 In terms of a utopian vision, the Star Trek future was at its best a model, a thought experiment that said: what if society consciously institutionalized the best human qualities, while guarding against its worst? What if we actually learned from our bloody mistakes, so the cruel excesses of history were not all in vain? What would that look like?

 In the ongoing present, that looked, for one thing, like hope. Unfortunately, in popular storytelling, Star Trek remains nearly unique in modeling a hopeful future. Other visions of how our technological society transforms itself to overcome ecological self-destruction are perhaps bound to be in more detailed forms, such as recent novels by Kim Stanley Robinson. 

 But as a utopian future driven or at least enabled by technology seems to recede in probability, it may be useful to turn to a different kind of utopian vision—one that would serve a technological society, but more likely, a society in which high technology is much less important, or even non-existent. 

 One such vision is rooted in the continents that once represented the future: the Americas. And though these roots are ancient and global, one of the first cultural expressions of this vision erupted in the 1890s, at about the same time that H.G. Wells was envisioning The Time Machine. But this time it was not in London, but in the American West.

 Next time: The Ghost Dance Future

Poetry Monday: After the Voice

After the Voices

 Youth is gone from the place where I was young

 even the language that I heard here once

 its cadences that went on echoing

 a youth forgotten and the great singing

 of the beginning have fallen silent

 with the voices that were the spirit of them

 and their absences were no more noticed

 than were those of the unreturning birds

 each spring until there were no words at all

 for what was gone but it was always so

 I have no way of telling what I miss

 I am only the one who misses it 

 W.S. Merwin

Young Merwin, probably at Deer Park 1948

 I’ve recently read Summer Doorways, Merwin’s prose memoir centered on the summer of his 21st year, in 1948. Fresh out of university, he is employed as a tutor by wealthy patrons, first on a huge estate in New Jersey, then on the French Riviera and in rural Portugal. Deer Park, the New Jersey estate, had buildings that dated back to before the American revolution, and remnants of the ancient forest that had elsewhere been cut down. The Europe he visited was only slightly changed from what it had been for centuries.

 But 20 years later, he writes, everything at Deer Park was gone, buried by freeways and suburban developments. By then the horse carts and bicycles of Europe were replaced by motorized vehicles, and the cityscapes and landscapes transformed for automobiles.

 As I read the book I saw this subterranean theme, but in its final pages the theme became explicit. The last sentence reads: “The move away from the valley of the Ceria [Portugal] would lead through years in which, again and again, I would have the luck to discover, to glimpse, to touch for a moment, some ancient, measureless way of living, of being in the world, some fabric long taken for granted, never finished yet complete, and evanescent as a work of art, an entire age just before it was gone, like a summer.” 

 There seems something of this situation in this short poem, though there is more. The poem comes from Merwin’s 2015 collection The Moon Before Morning, and other poems in this volume touch upon related aspects—not only about the voices and landscapes that are gone, but one’s own youth and youthful ambitions.  There is also a sense in the haunting line of "the unreturning birds" of the ultimate conclusion of our ecological crisis, never far from Merwin's thoughts or poems in his later years.

 The first few times I read this poem, I mistakenly read the final line as saying “I am the only one who misses it,” quite a different resonance than the accurate “I am only the one who misses it.” And yet, they do seem related. Merwin was 88 when he published these poems, so his perspective is more advanced than mine. But I too am beginning to feel not only the losses of the past—the places in their fullness, the voices-- but the loneliness, and yet the identity I find in memory.

Super-Spreader Bowl Sunday

You don't have to be a Kansas City fan to view today's Super Bowl outcome as the worst possible one: the Tampa Bay Bucs became the first team in NFL history to win the Super Bowl in their home stadium.  Consider that the photo above was taken of the partying in the street in Tampa Bay BEFORE the Super Bowl.  Now imagine what it's like tonight.

The Tampa Bay Super Spreader events follow a day in which people all over the country gathered in small spaces, eating, drinking and shouting at the top of their lungs.  Meanwhile, the news featured a new study that claims that the UK variant is already widespread in the US.  While the national numbers of infections and deaths have been going down, the combination of the new variant and yet another heedless holiday endangers all of us with new outbreaks in a couple of weeks.

Here in Humboldt the numbers have not gone down appreciably, and on Friday there were 11 new hospitalizations, representing every age group from the 20s through the 70s.  I can't recall a day of more than 2 new hospitalizations.  This week may tell us if this was just a freakish day, or something worse.

While I understand the psychological pressure everyone is under, and the greater urges for group activities in younger age groups, I can't help viewing these people as my jailers, at best, and threats to my life and the lives of my family.  It's not a super feeling. 

The Q Question

Why so many people fall so hard for the outlandish blandishments of the QAnon Conspiracy is a hot topic these days. I find some explanations at least partially convincing. But not others—especially coming from social scientists.

 In our age of Covid and climate crisis denial, “trust the science” has become our mantra. But not all purported science is good science, or meaningfully applied. That includes a whole lot of so-called social science that is done primarily by thinking up questions, asking them of a relatively small group of people and then making conclusions based on their answers, which usually involves statistics.  The statistics make it look like science.

 But the problems are often multiple: bad questions, asked of the wrong people (or not a diverse group of people), and making universal conclusions, not even justified by the “data.” The usual culprits are psychologists and political scientists.

 So when Thomas Edsall in his piece published in the New York Times dutifully went to social scientists, he got science that was inadequate or just plain bad. 

 The study conducted by the psychologists he consulted concluded that “the type of extremity that undergirds such support has less to do with traditional, left/right political concerns and more to do with extreme, antisocial psychological orientations and behavioral patterns.” This conclusion falls between the obvious (not traditional politics duh) and the unenlightening. Extreme beliefs are believed by extreme people is not much of a contribution, but then it neatly puts the question in the realm of psychology rather than politics. More work for them!

 Beyond that, the conclusions give more comfort to the self-satisfied than information on the phenomenon. It also sounds like what such types used to say about civil rights and antiwar activists.

 Then there are the political scientists who reportedly asked these questions: “Events like wars, the recession, and the outcomes of elections are controlled by small groups of people who are working in secret against the rest of us”; “Much of our lives are being controlled by plots hatched in secret places”; “Even though we live in a democracy, a few people will always run things anyway”; “The people who really ‘run’ the country, are not known to the voters.”

 If you agreed, presumably that made you an antisocial believer in conspiracy theories. The problem is that many people with a quite sophisticated knowledge of the world would also answer yes, at least partially, to these questions. I mean, “The people who really ‘run’ the country, are not known to the voters.” Did these political scientists never hear of lobbyists? The highly paid professionals, whose effectiveness depends on their invisibility to voters, with regular access to legislators and others in power, and who have been known to actually write the laws?  And that's just one example of many: bureaucrats, contractors, etc. even before getting to various power brokers.

 

“Much of our lives are being controlled by plots hatched in secret places.” Maybe these polysci folks knew about it, but I doubt many of us were aware of the initial plans to start Facebook, etc. Or were privvy to the meeting in 2017 in which Mitch McConnell and Republicans plotted to thwart the Obama administration’s every move. And so on.

 Sophisticated conspiracy theories probably start with a grain of truth. “Events like wars, the recession, and the outcomes of elections are controlled by small groups of people who are working in secret against the rest of us,” is not only the premise of fiction from Thomas Pynchon to your average streaming thriller, it is a widely held description of the role of the small if undefined group of the rich and powerful known as “the Establishment” in the 20th century. And there’s your Military Industrial Complex, and other “conspiracies” of huge faceless corporations.  

 These “scientists” do make some interesting observations, though without much in the way of explanation: the QAnon types will believe mutually contradictory conspiracy theories (Osama bin Laden was already dead when the Navy Seals found him, and he is also still alive, etc.) One of the psychologists wrote: “people are attracted to conspiracy theories when important psychological needs are not being met.” She identified three such needs: “the need for knowledge and certainty”; the “existential need” to “to feel safe and secure” when “powerless and scared”; and, among those high in narcissism, the “need to feel unique compared to others.” 

 None of these seem particularly abnormal needs, so maybe it’s worth figuring out why they are not met. And why the “need for knowledge and certainty” is not met by factual information and informed sources, and the usual checks on this information of consistency and real world evidence, etc.

 I return to the newness of the Internet and social media, which I flagged in a previous piece, and which is getting its attention (for instance, in a thoughtful interview in the Times with, of all people, Hillary Clinton, one of the major targets and perhaps inspirers of the QAnon conspiracy, and another Times interview with Michael Goldhaber, whose analysis of Internet potential that led to the boomlet for “the Attention Economy” some years ago is gaining new, well, attention.) 

I think it possible that, because they are new media, and because of their nature in providing instant access and communication to anyone and everyone, Internet media are exposing people to information without experience and skills in evaluating that information. Add to that what Clinton called the addictive quality of algorhythms, which I think even those of us who have gone no further than clicking on one YouTube music video after another can sense is probably very powerful.

 

I want to add one more factor here, that I’m surprised I have not seen elsewhere. To me, the most incomprehensible feature of the QAnon conspiracy tales is their extreme outlandishness. Thousands if not millions of people believe that certain high profile people are secretly engaged in organized child kidnappings and abuse, to the point of eating kidnapped children. Or that well-known and powerful people are really lizard beings from outer space in disguise. 

 Where does this imagery come from but the horror movies, science fiction and violent fantasies that drench the entertainment media as never before in anyone's lifetime?  Not only would these conspiracies be incomprehensible to most Americans in the 1950s, for instance, but these stories were way outside the mainstream, if they existed at all. 

 Today a 1940s and 50s superhero like Superman, or the Marvel heroes developed since the 60s, don’t bother fighting human criminals, or rescuing babies from burning buildings. They battle incredibly powerful beings from space or other dimensions or whatever, whose powers and evil natures are extreme.  Super-villains may use mind control and other invisible powers.

 More directly, the zombie mythologies of the past decade, now firmly part of American childhood in games as well as television and movie sagas, have boosted the degree and prevalence of creepy violence that makes cannibalizing children imaginable.  (The top photo is from such a movie.)

 And the lizard people reflect several generations of Star Trek and other science fiction prosthetic beings. This conspiracy in fact enacts a 2006 episode of Doctor Who, in which the Prime Minister of the UK and his cabinet are big green space beings uncomfortably encased in human skin suits. 

 Belief in such creatures has roots in history, just as the journey to QAnon in terms of culture and media has been documented over the past decades.  Belief in conspiracies is fed as well by actual exposure of real secrets, from the Pentagon Papers to more recent and notorious document dumps.  The search for hidden meanings and ciphers is familiar from popular fiction like The Da Vinci Code. And that also is where this kind of social science fails—it is basically ahistoric. And that doesn’t explain much.