A Better Metaphor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Man in the Landscape

Man in the Landscape

 (for Paul Shepard) 

 At Houghton Point I once thought

 to move through the woods without changing

 them, impossible, but to try,

 to reduce the flattery to a minimum.

 Will the flowers show themselves?

 It is the wrong question.

 Or take the landscape as a whole:

 there’s nothing you can do for a rock

 except at the expense of beetles and grass.

 Hills need valleys, lakes rivers,

 where does the landscape end?

                                        Everything 

wants to grow according to its nature.

Every place is itself a growing thing.

Where I am I am part of the place.

 Moving through the land I am looking for the

 land

 where my tracks will root and grow

 behind me.

 --Samuel Moon

 from A Little Farther: Selected Works of Samuel Moon

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

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

R.I.P.

 

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

Living With Change

 

When the government’s dull and confused,

 the people are placid.

 When the government’s sharp and keen,

 the people are discontented.

 Alas! misery lies under happiness,

 and happiness sits on misery, alas!

 Who knows where it will end?

 Nothing is certain.

 The normal changes into the monstrous,

 the fortunate into the unfortunate,

 and our bewilderment

 goes on and on.

 And so the wise

 shape without cutting, 

square without sawing,

 true without forcing.

They are the light that does not shine.

 --Lao Tzu 

translation by Ursula K. Le Guin

photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson

Mariupol

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Week in American Fascism

 Culled from Political Wire in the past week or so:

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

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

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

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

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

"Quote of the Day"

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

And one from TPM:

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

Flame, speech

Flame, speech

 I read in a poem: 

 to talk is divine.

 But the gods don’t speak:

 they make and unmake worlds

 while men do the talking. 

 They play frightening games

 without words.

 The spirit descends,

 loosening tongues,

 but doesn’t speak words:

 it speaks fire.

 Lit by a god,

 language becomes

 a prophesy

 of flames and a tower

 of smoke and collapse

 of syllables burned:

 ash without meaning.

 The word of man

 is the daughter of death.

 We talk because we are mortal:

 words are not signs, they are years. 

 Saying what they say,

 the words we are saying

 say time: they name us.

 We are time’s names. 

 To talk is human.

 --Octavio Paz 

translated by Mark Strand

 

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

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

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

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

Madeleine Albright Dared Call It Fascism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Dunce

 He says no with his head

 but he says yes with his heart

 he says yes to what he loves

 he says no to the teacher

 he stands

 he is questioned

 and all the problems are posed

 sudden mad laughter seizes him

 and he erases all

 the words and figures

 names and dates

 sentences and snares

 and despite the teacher’s threats

 to the jeers of infant prodigies

 with chalk of every color

 on the blackboard of misfortune

 he draws the face of happiness. 

 --Jacques Prevert

 translated from the French by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watching the Jet Planes Dive

 

We must go back and find a trail on the ground

 back of the forest and mountain on the slow land;

 we must begin to circle on the intricate sod.

 By such wild beginnings without help we may find

 the small trail on through the buffalo-bean vines. 

 

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

 and climb over the map in far places, everywhere,

 and lie down whenever there is doubt and sleep there.

 If roads are unconnected we must make a path,

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

 We must find something forgotten by everyone alive,

 and make some fabulous gesture when the sun goes down

 as they do by custom in little Mexico towns

 where they crawl for some ritual up a rocky steep. 

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

 --William Stafford

TV and Me: Robin Hood and the Blacklist

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

The quintessential English heroes have long been King Arthur and Robin Hood.  They are foundational legends within England and known internationally.  In the 1950s, before Lerner and Lowe’s hit musical Camelot, the best known of these epic heroes in the US was probably Robin Hood.

 So it was fitting that the first television series centered on Robin Hood was shot in England with English actors for an English TV network by a production company in England.  And so it must have seemed when episodes of The Adventures of Robin Hood crossed the Atlantic in 1955 to appear on American television.

 But behind the scenes there was another story, with different heroes.  The Adventures of Robin Hood was scripted primarily by American writers, mostly living in the U.S.   But by a particular category of American writers.

 Even at nine years old (which is what I was as the 1955 fall television season began) I’d heard about the Communist Menace.  I saw headlines about it in the newspapers and was aware of it from television.  The Sisters talked about it at school, as did occasionally the priests from the Sunday pulpit.  They called it “Godless Communism.”  The danger wasn’t just the Soviet Union, with its atomic bombs threatening to crash down on us while we hugged our heads under our school desks.  It was also Communist subversion-- Communists undercover in our own country. 

There was a kind of hysteria, some of it organized, and an atmosphere of fear that some stoked for their own advantages. Whatever justification there was for alarm about Soviet subversion, a combination of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, Senator Joseph McCarthy, the U.S. House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) and allied groups (such as the American Legion, which led boycotts of movies, etc.)  and individuals went much further in attacking any sort of dissent, political activity or ideas they didn’t like, for their own political—and in some cases, monetary—profit and power.  Opportunism, reactionary politics, anti-union fury and not just a whiff of anti-Semitism came to characterize this witchhunt.

 The American Communist Party was a registered political party subject to U.S. laws, and membership in it was not a crime. None of the accused was ever shown to advocate the violent overthrow of the US government.  In fact, those who resisted their inquisitors did so as staunch defenders of the Constitution. 

 Nevertheless, these forces destroyed the livelihoods and distorted the lives of thousands of Americans, including many with little or no relationship to the American Communist Party, often with false and flimsy charges and innuendo.  It was cancel culture writ large—and it affected the entire culture. 

 It was felt on college campuses and in schools at other levels, in government, organized religion and other institutions and businesses.  But it had a particular impact in arts and entertainment—to some extent in the theatre, but mostly in the movies and television. 

Ring Lardner, Jr. of the Hollywood Ten

In 1947, HUAC hearings resulted in contempt charges for screenwriters and other Hollywood professionals because they refused to name names of their colleagues.  The ones indicted became known as the Hollywood Ten. They sold their homes and assets, and (as Dalton Trumbo said later) prepared to become nobody.  They eventually went to prison for a year. (Lardner served in the same prison as the congressman who had questioned him—he had since been convicted of financial fraud.)

 Shortly after their indictment, Hollywood studio heads met at the Waldorf Hotel in Manhattan and issued the Waldorf Statement which declared that the ten would never work in Hollywood again, and others who were shown to be communists would not be employed there.  This was the origin of the Hollywood Blacklist.

 Though the Waldorf statement recognized how easy it would be to unjustly victimize individuals, that’s exactly what happened.  Thanks to a few powerful outlets that published names, many were condemned for being seen with a suspected communist, or for involvement in civil rights, civil liberties, labor organizing and other such causes that the American Communist Party sometimes supported, or simply for expressing a view.  Or by mistake, or for vengeance, or no reason at all except the need to continually churn out names.

Harry Belafonte

 By the mid-1950s the Blacklist was at its height. Among those blacklisted were such well known figures as composer Aaron Copland, conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, band leader Artie Shaw, and folk singer Pete Seeger; writers Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, Arthur Laurents, Dashiell Hammett, and journalists William Shirer, Charles Collingwood and Howard K. Smith, as well as actors Judy Holliday, Burgess Meredith, Lee Grant, Zero Mostel, and Will Geer, and director-actor Orson Welles, directors Joseph Losey and Martin Ritt, among many others.

   A conspicuous number of Black figures in the arts and entertainment were blacklisted, such as Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, Josh White, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee. 

John Garfield

Many of the Hollywood actors and writers in particular were not employed in their industry for seven, ten, twelve or more years. Others, from big stars like actor John Garfield (who refused to name names) to many lesser-knowns, lost their careers forever, and some lost their health, their marriages and in a few cases, their lives to suicide.  The blacklist became so institutionalized that it continued well into the 1960s, and had lingering effects even in the 70s, long after the McCarthy period was over.

    A few lesser-knowns got some work because of defiant directors and producers: Alfred Hitchcock employed actor Norman Lloyd, and Robert Wise refused to drop Sam Jaffe from the cast of the 1951 The Day the Earth Stood Still.  Both became big TV stars in later decades: Jaffe as Dr. Zorba in the medical drama Ben Casey, and Lloyd in a later medical drama, St. Elsewhere.

 And one lesser-known actor was saved by Superman. Veteran film actor Robert Shayne was in the cast of The Adventures of Superman, playing police Inspector Henderson, when his wife divorced him, and accused him of being a Communist.  His offense seems to have been an interest in unionizing.  As he was being investigated, George Reeves, Superman himself, vouched for him.  He was soon a regular on the show. 

But all of this had a profound effect on the culture of Hollywood (which quickly made some 50 anticommunist propaganda films) and America in general. Dissent and political activity died down, the narcosis identified with the 1950s began. It probably wasn’t a coincidence that in the 1940s cartoons Superman fought for truth and justice, but on TV in the 50s he also fought for the American Way, standing stalwart in front of a huge waving flag. 

Brecht

Hollywood had been energized by the artists and intellectuals who fled from Germany and elsewhere in Europe to southern California just before and during World War II.  Now in the Blacklist 50s, playwright Bertoldt Brecht led the exodus back the other way.  But the emigration also included Hollywood hands born in the USA.  Some hid out in Mexico, and some fled to Canada and Europe.  Some didn’t come back for a very long time.

  One of these refugees from repression was Hannah Weinstein, a journalist and political operative who worked on the New York mayoral campaign of Fiorello La Guardia, and the presidential campaign of Franklin D. Roosevelt.  She and screenwriter Ring Lardner, Jr. wrote speeches for Orson Welles and Charlie Chaplin, supporting FDR.  All four of them were eventually blacklisted.

 But before anyone could name her name, Weinstein relocated to Paris in 1950, and then moved to London two years later.  There she established a production company, Sapphire Films.

 In 1954, legislation was passed in England to foster competition with the state-owned British Broadcasting Company (BBC.)  A private company developed by Lew Grade called ITV was hungry for programs, especially the kind that could draw attention and audience. Hannah Weinstein and Sapphire Films had a proposal he liked.  

Producer Hannah Weinstein with
Robin Hood cast members

The Adventures of Robin Hood went on the air on ITV in England on September 25, 1955, and a day later in the US, broadcast by CBS on Monday evenings at 7:30, sponsored by Johnson & Johnson and Wildroot  Cream-Oil hair tonic.  It became an immediate hit in both countries.  Its four seasons (three seasons of 39 episodes each, one season of 26, for a total of 143 half-hour shows) ran until the end of 1960.  Syndicated re-runs began even before the first run was over, and the show was often scheduled for Saturday mornings, sometimes with a slightly different title (“Adventures in Sherwood Forest.”)

 It was a triumph for English folklore and free enterprise.  But The Adventures of Robin Hood had a secret: it was written almost exclusively by blacklisted American writers, including at least one of the Hollywood Ten, Weinstein’s former writing partner, and Academy Award-winning screenwriter Ring Lardner, Jr.  It’s been estimated that 22 blacklisted writers worked on episodes for this show, always using pseudonyms.  Most of them still resided in the US (some because they’d had their passports revoked.) 

Their participation had to be kept secret, and it was. A number of pseudonyms were used so that none would stand out, and they usually were typical British-sounding names. 

Moreover, the Robin Hood series was such a hit that Weinstein quickly followed with two others widely seen in the US as well as England: The Buccaneers and The Adventures of Sir Lancelot.  Lancelot of course was a Knight of the Round Table, so King Arthur (the other English hero) made it to American TV as well. More blacklisted writers worked on Lancelot and The Buccaneers.

 Starting in 1956, we could watch Robin Hood and Lancelot back to back on Monday nights, though we might have to switch the channel to an NBC station at 8.  Also that fall, we saw The Buccaneers on Saturdays at 7:30 p. on CBS.

 This was the ironic vengeance of the Blacklist.  The blacklisting authorities claimed they were only concerned with eliminating subversive ideas from being concealed in American entertainment, and foisted on innocent American viewers.  No real Soviet propaganda was ever found in a Hollywood film or TV show.  But thanks to the Hollywood blacklist, blacklisted writers were now churning out stories around ideas that the blacklist promoters might well consider subversive, and the most innocent Americans of all—namely nine year olds—were watching them every week. 

The two features that defined The Adventures of Robin Hood to me and my friends are the same two that likely remain in the memories of those who watched it: the opening shots and the song at the end.

 Each episode began with Richard Greene as Robin Hood pulling back his bowstring and letting the arrow fly, with a whoosh, a whirring sound and a vibrating plunk as it hit a tree, followed by a drumbeat and the trumpet flourish. It was one of the most effective sounds associated with any TV show.

 Then after the story came the song, sometimes just the hypnotic chorus: Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen/Robin Hood, Robin Hood, with his band of men/Feared by the bad, loved by the good/ Robin Hood, Robin Hood, Robin Hood.

 By the age of nine I was playing regularly with three other boys, neighbors on each side of our house.  Across our houses on Lincoln Avenue was a fairly large patch of trees and brush (it later hosted lots for three or four houses), that became our Sherwood Forest.  (We noticed that the Lincoln Road passed through Sherwood, and Robin's band dressed in Lincoln green.)

  We immediately got interested in the quarterstaves that Robin and the outlaws carried and used in their fights, and in our woods it was easy enough to find and fashion such a staff.  They made satisfying sounds when we clunked them against one another in our simulated combat.

 We actually experienced a double dose of Robin Hood in 1955. Walt Disney made a Technicolor feature film in 1952, The Story of Robin Hood starring Richard Todd (some of which was shot in the real Sherwood Forest), and showed an edited version on his TV show in two parts in November. Robin Hood’s fight with Little John on a narrow bridge over a river using quarterstaves was more elaborate than on the TV series. 

 Our experiments fashioning bows and arrows were less successful.  A few years later, probably while the Robin Hood series was still on the air, two of my friends—the brothers who lived across a grass field to the south—were given real fiberglass bows by their father.  We set up targets and learned to shoot a little, but we couldn’t really use them for play.  None of us got good enough to even pretend to be Robin Hood in an archery contest.  

When The Adventures of Sir Lancelot began in the fall of 1956, we saw a different style of sword fighting—with the big flat broadswords, sometimes with shields but sometimes using two hands. These were also easier to simulate with wood. We also learned the vocabulary of challenge and acknowledging defeat: “I yield.” 

 While all this was of first interest, the stories were satisfying enough that we kept watching.  Unlike Superman, I’d heard of Robin Hood and King Arthur. There was a long story in the My Book House Books volume In Shining Armor about Robin Hood, for instance, though it was based on an older version set in the era of Henry II.  The TV series and most modern versions of Robin Hood place him in the era of Richard the Lionhearted (Henry’s son) and the Crusades.  Similarly, the legends of King Arthur evolved over the centuries, but each version of Camelot sets the stage for the next iteration.

 So what were the subversive ideas we innocents absorbed? The most obvious is the best known quality of the Robin Hood legend as it developed through the centuries: he took from the rich and gave to the poor.

 That indeed was almost enough to get Robin Hood himself blacklisted, or more specifically, banned.  In 1953 a member of the Indiana Textbook Commission called for eliminating Robin Hood from all educational materials in the state, because Communists were allegedly advocating Robin Hood’s income equality measures be emphasized in education.

 Although the governor of Indiana also spoke darkly of a Commie takeover of the Robin Hood legend, the commission didn’t act.  Still, the proposal inspired protest by the “Green Feather Movement” on the Indiana University campus.  Five students distributed green feathers all over campus, with handbills explaining the issue.  The local newspaper denounced them as Commie “dupes,” and the five students were reportedly investigated by the FBI.  This was the McCarthy era in small.

 Of course this was all nearly 70 years ago. We’re way beyond that sort of thing now.

Robin and the Sheriff (Alan Wheatley)

 In the series Robin Hood did make a policy of robbing the corrupt rich and distributing to the exploited poor. But these acts weren’t characterized as political.  Robin Hood’s weekly opponent, the Sheriff of Nottingham (played by Alan Wheatley) often spoke instead of Robin Hood being “sentimental” for helping the poor or unjustly accused, or rescuing those in trouble.  It may seem a curious word now, but in the 50s “sentimental” was another word for “womanly” or effeminate, unmanly—an echo of the implied charge against Superman. 

 This Robin Hood series made it clear that the rich being robbed were mostly those whose wealth was ill-gotten gain, chiefly by taking from the poor. To us as children, Robin Hood’s actions just seemed fair, and as psychologists and parents are aware, children have a very strong sense of fairness.

 But there were story points beyond this, some suggesting issues relevant to the blacklist itself.  A central conflict of the blacklist era was between those who informed on others, either out of conviction or to try to save themselves, and those who refused to name names. Some who did name names (like director Elia Kazan) ruined careers and lives.  Though blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo famously observed that the blacklist had “only victims,” some never forgave the informers. So as late as 1999, Elia Kazan’s honorary Oscar was met with protests and a number of actors in the audience who refused to applaud or turned their backs.  

There were stories in both the Robin Hood and Lancelot series that dealt with informers and traitors, the unjustly accused and punished, all the stuff of drama and history beyond the blacklist, but pertinent to what happened in Hollywood. Similarly, the corrupt Sheriff as well as dishonest nobles often tried to use Robin Hood and his band as scapegoats for their own misdeeds and swindles.  It’s not much of a stretch to see that as reflecting the views of the blacklisted.

  Many more stories concerned issues that reflected broadly applicable and widely held convictions shared by the writers—including perhaps the kind that got them in trouble with those in power who had a more constricted world view.  For example:

 In “The Salt King,” a noble with the legal corner on selling salt creates an artificial shortage by robbing his own shipment, and then quadruples his prices, until the outlaws of Sherwood foil his plan.  In “A Tuck in Time,” Robin Hood prevents the auction of a primitive cannon powered by “devil’s powder,” temporarily preventing an arms race.  

In “The York Treasure,” Robin stops Malbet, a racist noble from preventing Jewish refugees from landing. Malbet gives several speeches railing about the duty of “right thinking people” to keep out “their dirty kind” with their “low foreign cunning,” to maintain England for the English.  Malbet—whose actual purpose is to steal the money that two Jewish citizens have gathered to pay for the refugees’ passage-- is certain the refugees won’t fight back, but he’s wrong about that.

 In “A Change of Heart,” a lord refuses to allow a small band of “primitive” Celts from remaining on their land, arguing that in the medieval schema, they aren’t really people.  With the use of a sleeping potion, Robin convinces the lord that he is actually one of the Celts, and soon he is arguing that the Celts have human rights, and a right to their land. 

Billie Whitelaw

There’s a preview of women’s liberation in “The Bride of Robin Hood,” with guest star Billie Whitelaw, who would soon become Samuel Beckett’s most important collaborator, and would star in several Albert Finney films, especially Charlie Bubbles. 

 Disguised as a boy, she saves Robin’s life with her archery skills. Speculating on her motives for attacking the Sheriff’s soldiers, Robin suggests she may have suffered some oppression herself.  As she pulls back her hood to reveal her feminine blond hair, she says, “All my life, beginning in the cradle as a disgrace because you weren’t born a boy.  They think it’s a waste of time to teach you anything, and then they marry you off without bothering to consult you.”  (However, the episode soon becomes a conventional comedy.)

 Of course there were many more stories with variations on the standard plots and conflicts, as well as other contemporary topics treated with a light touch, as when Robin shows a pair of comic juvenile delinquents the error of their ways, or the Sheriff lays siege to a castle with Robin inside, where he happily cavorts with Maid Marian.

 These were all in the context of adventure stories, with battles, captures and escapes, and wars of wits between Robin Hood and the Sheriff.  There was considerable humor, from slapstick to witty banter, aided by guest performers such as the brilliant comic actor Leo McKern. Donald Pleasance made a deliciously evil King John in one of five episodes directed by Lindsay Anderson, who later directed the late 1960s cult film, “If…” that made Malcolm McDowell a star.

 The Adventures of Robin Hood was filmed partly in a British studio and partly on locations, often on the estate of producer Hannah Weinstein.  Richard Greene starred as Robin Hood throughout, Alexander Gauge as Friar Tuck and Archie Duncan as Little John (except for the episodes he missed because of injuries from his real life heroics, saving some visitors to the set from errant animal actors).  Alan Wheatley was the sinister but never frightening Sheriff of Nottingham (replaced in the fourth season by John Arnatt as the deputy sheriff), and Bernadette O’Farrell was an attractive Maid Marian (replaced by Patricia Driscoll.) 

Lee Grant 

As a 9 year old, I’d heard of the Red Menace and a little about McCarthyism, but I knew nothing about the Blacklist.  Nor did I know much about it at 19, or for some years thereafter.

  In fact the Blacklist had been lost to history until the mid-1970s, when its 1950s reality was finally admitted.  While accepting her acting Oscar in 1976, Lee Grant was the first to mention that she’d been blacklisted in the 50s. (Writer Milliard Lampell announced his blacklisting while accepting a television Emmy a decade earlier.) 

The first feature film about the Blacklist was released in 1976, The Front, made by a blacklisted director (Martin Ritt), written by a blacklisted writer (Walter Bernstein), with several blacklisted actors in the cast, including Zero Mostel.

  That same year, Hollywood on Trial, the first documentary film on the Blacklist, was nominated for an Academy Award.  It was made by friends of mine in Boston, and I followed its process from nearly beginning to end, viewing hours of interview footage that didn’t get into the film, and as far as I know have never otherwise been seen.  I met several children of the blacklisted, some without knowing they were at first, and eventually wrote about the effects on their lives. I had in fact worked with Ring Lardner, Jr.’s son, James, a few years before knowing much about the blacklist.

 It was later in the 70s that I heard that blacklisted writers had found work on the Robin Hood show, though it’s only been in putting this post together that I learned many of the details.  

In his Spotlight review of The Adventures of Robin Hood, Allen W. Wright observed, “Many children of that generation would be inspired by this series. One professor remarked that show formed the basis of her morality.” 

 "Robin Hood ran for four years, generating profits for everyone concerned,” Ring Lardner, Jr. concluded in his autobiography, “and perhaps, in some small way, setting the stage for the 1960s by subverting a whole new generation of young Americans."

 But though the connection to the blacklist gives these shows a giddy emphasis and curiosity they didn’t have at the time, and while I appreciate the ironies involved, there is the additional irony that these shows written by blacklisted writers weren’t all that different from others we were seeing.  These were similar to stories and themes in some other dramas and adventures we watched, including several already described in this TV and Me series. 

 And maybe that’s the point.  The blacklist as it evolved was not only dangerous and destructive, it was arbitrary and capricious.  It did needless damage that lasted for decades, both to individual lives and to movies and the culture.  But though it dampened adult culture in the conformist 50s, it may have missed the future, thanks in part to Robin Hood.