The Occult History

[previously posted on We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Party]

I won the raffle at a party thrown by a job agency a while back, and one of the prizes was a gift certificate from Starbucks. I don’t drink coffee; a single glass of Coke at dinner is enough to move my sleep time back an hour or more. But Starbucks sells other stuff, so I had a cup of hot chocolate and bought the Dylan No Direction Home CD.

The PBS special on Dylan was directed by Scorsese, and covered Dylan’s career up to the point where he had his motorcycle accident. It feels important, somehow, that Dylan survived the accident, that he didn’t follow the “good career move” that got so many of the other 60s icons. Dylan was always the Trickster, so it also feels appropriate, and besides, living is better than dying. I don’t care how many mediocre albums he’s made since then, how many unmemorable songs. He’s alive; good for him.

One of the things that was very obvious, and left very unmentioned, in No Direction Home was how thoroughly ripped he was for much of the time. The scenes from “Don’t Look Back” were particularly obvious, with Dylan’s speech, wordplay, little tics and gestures, all showing the obvious signs of amphetamine use. Gee, a pop star in the 60s on tour, using speed. What a shock. And a lot of his songs are scornful; just watch one of his press conferences and take a guess as to why.

The obvious reason why the documentary didn’t mention the drug use is that, once drugs get mentioned in any narrative, the overall narrative gets hijacked by the drug narrative. It’s pretty much the same with sex; once sex gets mentioned, it takes over the story line, because that’s what people are most interested in. I’m not sure what happens to a sex narrative once drugs are mentioned, or vice versa. I suspect it’s just that there is a sex/drugs story, and well, there you are.

The drug narrative, in order to be palatable, pretty much has to follow either the “I saw the light and now I am redeemed” plot line, or the “descent into hell followed by death” plot line. No others are really acceptable to a mass audience, although there are specialty tastes, of course, and times do change. It used to be the case that adultery had to be punished, for example, but not so much these days. Of course, adultery used to be actually illegal, and drugs still are. More accurately, the drug narrative is the illegal drug narrative. Legal drugs tend not to get much of a mention because there is no “moral principle” involved, unless the drugs are procured illegally, of course.

This wasn’t always the case. Opium was legal when Coleridge wrote “Kubla Khan” and that got turned into a morality fable, of a sort. When you examine it closely, however, it’s hard to find what the moral of the tale is. Without opium, there wouldn’t have been a poem; its incompleteness is usually blamed on the “gentleman from Porlack.” It’s also worth asking if “Kubla Khan” would have received the same response if it had not been known as an opium dream, and if it had been finished. Again, no way to know, is there?

Drugs affect art. Hell, everything affects art. But drugs, owing to their effects on the psyche, modify art more than most other things. Of course, love has had more effect on art than, say, heroin or amphetamines, but love has its own neurotransmitters. Pharmacologically, love is a stimulant. Add War, in its most general terms, to the list, and you’re still talking about internally generated substances linked to external events. Love, War, Drugs, go write about those. Let me know if you find richer subjects.

Most of the attention given to drugs in the narrative of the artist and the artistic life follows the plot of seduction and corruption. He had such a promising career until he became an addict. By the time she was 40, she looked 70 and her voice was shot, owing to the combination of alcohol and drugs. And so forth.

I once saw a bio of F. Scott Fitzgerald that referred to the matter as a “Faustian Bargain,” and that has more truth to it. We can decry the art lost to early death from alcoholism, but we cannot know how much of the art during life was the product of that alcoholism. One is supposed to hew to the line that drugs and alcohol only subtract, never add, but can one really listen to “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and believe that it would have been the same song without a speed boost?

Dylan in particular was old school beat poetry with a rhyming dictionary. Try to imagine Kerouac without the liquor and speed, Burroughs without the heroin, Ginsberg without the peyote. One might was well imagine Nick and Nora Charles without martinis or Hemmingway without the guns and fights.

In SF, there are also plenty of overt examples of the occult history. In my essay Sleeping in Fritz Leiber’s Bed, I note that Leiber’s alcoholism informed a number of his stories, including ”The Thirteenth Step”, “Gonna Roll the Bones”, and “The Secret Songs”. Leiber might have written other stories had he not been an alcoholic, but they would have been different stories. The same is surely true of Philip K. Dick, whose habit (until his health failed him) was to sell a book contract, then take enough amphetamine to “speed rush” (Dick’s own phrase for it) the book into existence. And really now, does anyone think that Dick’s paranoid, reality-shifting, dark-yet-glittering visions would have been the same without the meth and dex?

The title of this essay is the short-hand that my friend Dave and I use to refer to the general subject of the effects of drugs on history generally, but on art in particular. I think Dave first used it when he’d listened to Elvis: The Sun Sessions and discovered a cut entitled “Bop Pills.” “Jim,” he said, “We overlooked something very important. Elvis was a truck driver.” What he meant, of course, was that truck drivers have always used uppers, and always knew where to get them. “Bop Pills” was part of how you got to bop.

You can certainly make your own list of all the art that has had drugs as part of the pervasive influence. “Wine, women, and song,” has been replaced by “Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n Roll.” It’s the same old song, though everything else about it has changed.

Well hell, without sex and drugs, what would the songs be about?

Working the System

“Systems Biology Calls for New Way of Training Doctors” – sidebar headline in Chemical and Engineering News

The first feedback control device was probably the float valve, used in ancient water clocks. I’m discounting biological and other feedback systems, obviously. Those are usually called homeostasis.

Prior to the 20th century, there aren’t a lot of examples of feedback devices. Watt’s governor is the one most commonly cited, and its 18th century origin was close to concurrent with the steam release valve, which is also a feedback device. The governor is also of note because it is an example of proportional control. It didn’t just shut the steam on and off; it throttled the steam by varying the size of an aperture.

On/Off control is the sort that you get with a thermostat. When the temperature drops, the furnace kicks on at full force, then it stops when the temperature rises. That produces a limit cycle because the process is non-linear. If the furnace heating were proportional to the difference between the room temperature and the thermostat’s set point, then you’d have proportional control. That also produces a cycle, but the cycle is sinusoidal, and the process is termed linear, because of the type of equation that describes it.

The 19th century invention of a torpedo control system by Robert Whitehead was probably the first mechanical invention that addressed the oscillation problem. The first torpedo designs used a simple hydrostatic valve to adjust the control fins, but this caused “porpoising,” an up-and-down motion that sometimes put the torpedo above the surface of the water. Whitehead realized that something was needed to damp out the fluctuations, so he devised a pendulum that crudely measured the torpedo’s angle and modified the control in the direction to reduce that angle. This added a rate-of-change term (aka, a derivative) to the control equation, and reduced the depth fluctuations of the torpedo from 40 ft. to less than 6.

The problem with a proportional controller with damping is that the system often settles to a point of stable error, because the small error signal is damped out by the derivative signal. The solution to that is to add what is called the integral term, so a small error signal is integrated over time, and thus builds to a large enough signal to move the settling point.

The first example of a full PID (proportional-integral-derivative) controller comes in 1922, when N. Minorsky devised an automatic controller for the steering of ships. The mathematical characterization of control systems was also advanced enough by then to properly analyze such systems.

The “feedback loop” as it came to be called, seemed to offer some benefit to another, more general problem, of the sort that a wide variety of scientists and others were facing, that of the reductionist trap. When someone says, “We’re nothing but a bunch of atoms that think we’re alive,” that’s voicing the reductionist trap. A bunch of atoms we certainly are, but it doesn’t seem accurate to say that we’re nothing but a bunch of atoms. There are, after all, a lot of bunches of atoms around, but none of them behave just like me. I rather doubt that any of them think they are me, either.

Another way of addressing the problem is to use phrases like “emergent phenomena,” which is a fancy way of saying that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Since a feedback loop is also more than the sum of its parts, and since homeostasis (feedback, remember) is a general characteristic of living organisms, there came a general belief that feedback analysis might offer some insights into biology, or psychology, or sociology.

Thus was born the Cybernetics Movement, which included some folks like A. H. Maslow, whom I mentioned in a recent essay, as well as Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, plus some heavy hitters like Claude Shannon, John von Neumann, and Norbert Weiner, whose 1950 book, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society became a best-seller. I’ll mention in passing that Claude Shannon had just pretty much invented information theory, which, aside from revolutionizing electronic communications, also became part of the cybernetics movement.

Later, Cybernetics became General Systems Theory, which was not exactly a cult and not exactly a movement. But it did have some Believers, and I was probably one of them. The systems guys were of the belief that systems theory could be applied to, if not everything, an awfully big part of everything, and that it could and would revolutionize everything it was applied to.

In my own case, as I’ve previously written, I was attracted to the idea of simulation modeling of large scale biological, environmental, and social systems. I started off doing lake ecology, then slid over to atmospheric chemistry with barely a hiccup, because the methods of analysis were so similar. So that part of the program worked pretty well, at least from my viewpoint. However, I hit the downside of it all pretty quickly.

The downside was first, that while the tools of analysis were top notch, to use them in real world situations, you need a lot of data, and the methods of data collection weren’t really up to it. I hit that first in lake ecosystem modeling, where data from sunlight, nutrients, and plankton were pretty good, but the data we had for fish populations were horrible. And, oddly enough, the fish were important. After that experience, atmospheric science was wonderful; there was so much data available.

The second drawback was the real killer: analysis isn’t enough. In order to “change the world” you have to change the world. You can have the right answer, but if people aren’t willing to use it, what good is it? And, if your way of doing things is different in any way from what people are already doing, what they are, in fact, trained to do, you’re not going to make much headway.

It doesn’t help to blame the other guy, either. Everyone thinks their job is hard and everyone else’s is easy. No, what they are is different. Getting the correct engineering analysis isn’t the same as getting the right policy analysis, and neither of them make getting the policy adopted that much easier.

The worst of it was with the physicians. They go through hell getting their medical education. If you want medicine to change, you’re going to have to wait for an entirely new cohort. Worse, because medical education is also controlled by those same people, you’re actually talking about many generations. I watched more than one systems engineer bash his head into that brick wall, over and over again.

The quote at the beginning of this essay is from July, 2006. It could just as easily have been from 1976. Or 1956 Maybe it will happen, but I’m not holding my breath.

Scholarship

If I were a high school history teacher, I’d assign my students the project of selecting one year from before they were born and to find a library with newspapers from that year, then to read the entire year of at least one of the newspapers. Two or three would be better, of course. They wouldn’t have to read each one all the way through, of course, but they would have to select at least one or two news articles from each paper to read in its entirety.

I once did pretty much exactly this for two New York newspapers for 1911, Hearst’s New York American and The Morning Telegraph (not a Hearst paper), because Damon Runyon wrote for the former and Bat Masterson wrote for the latter. I had a story in mind, and I managed 20,000 words of it, though I’d need to get back to the source material to do any more of it. It took a particular mindset, and that mindset came only with full immersion.

That’s more or less my first point here, that history looks a lot different when it’s happening, and primary sources are essential. Otherwise, you’re just taking sides in what amounts to literary criticism, comparing the narratives assembled by different historians, each with their own notions of what parts are important. That’s true with the newspaper accounts also, of course, but the narrative tissue is often easier to unwrap when it’s been hastily conjured in an ephemeral publication.

My experience also left me with a certain unease about historical fiction generally, including alternate history. Part of that comes from a realization that I had that it’s impossible to do historical figures justice in a modern narrative. Their actions made sense to them, embedded as they were in their own times, but modern audiences will not abide a true re-creation of those times (how many previous years’ bestsellers are even in print nowadays?), and translation to modern sensibilities smothers the real individuals.

I don’t have that sort of problem with out-and-out historical fantasies; it’s understood (at least by me) that the Edison or Coleridge that you encounter in a Tim Powers novel isn’t meant to be the real guy, and anyone who confuses them has trouble telling fact from fiction in the first place.

The problem is hardly limited to history, is it? Amy sometimes does transcription work, and seems to have found a small niche amongst a certain sort of documentary filmmaker. As a result, we have videotapes of various people talking about Sam Wagstaff, who was Robert Maplethorpe’s lover, patron, and promoter, and who was, as much as anyone, responsible for the shift in the consideration of photography as fine art. One of the interviews is with Patti Smith, who lived with Maplethorpe for a time in the 1970s, and whose presence, judging by the video, is absolutely riveting. That may be just the fan in me talking, since I consider Patti Smith as one of the artists in the 20th Century who kept the word “poet” from becoming something risible. But however you figure it, I’ll bet that the eventual documentary doesn’t feel the same as the original source material, because there will be someone else’s notion of the narrative in between.

Another one of the transcription projects concerned the movement to ban military recruitment from high schools and colleges. There we got to see an interview with Cindy Sheehan, talking about her son Casey. This was several months before Sheehan became famous, and the raw emotion and the severity of the injury to her soul was just nakedly displayed. This is one of those cases where the competing pro and anti-war narratives have done a substantial job of smothering the original truth of the matter. But the original source material destroys all subsequent storylines, starkly projecting the central image of a woman shattered at the loss of her child.

Real history doesn't play into narrative that well. It often misses the good tricks. I had certain reasons for reading newspapers from 1911, reasons that didn't include the occurance of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. A novelist would have had some foreshadowing, but with newspapers, you just turn the crank on the microfilm reader and suddenly you are staring at one of the most famous tragedies of the early 20th Century. No good storyteller would just hit you in the face like that, but history is a story made up after the fact, while original events are facts on the wing.

Everybody Beats Mozart (Except Those who Don't)

“It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years.” –Tom Lehrer

I noticed when writing (actually reposting from my sff.net newsgroup) my recent memoriam for Lin Carter that I am now the age at which he died of mouth cancer. Actually, I'm a little older than he was, so I beat Lin Carter.

Dan Fogelberg, who was not quite a year younger than I, died late last year, so I beat Dan Fogelberg, too, and, for that matter, John Entwistle, who died a few months shy of 56.

There's a whole raft of pop culture icons who died in their early-to-mid 50's. Frank Zappa, Jerry Garcia, Michael Landon, Bill Bixby, John Ritter, Jim Henson. All of us guys from the peak of the Baby Boom who are still around, we win the slow bicycle race, right?

My favorite headline from the now defunct Weekly World News was "Elvis Dead at 57!" which they published in 1992, when Elvis would have been 57. Or perhaps I should say, when Elvis was 57 in Earth-WWN. Elvis actually died in 1977, when he was 42. I have slightly-better-than-urban-legend knowledge (a friend of mine knew one of the ER staff that dealt with the body when they brought it in) that he was really D-E-A-D on arrival. They tried to revive him anyway, of course. I mean, it was Elvis.

"The parallels are astonishing. Elvis died on a toilet. Kennedy died in Dallas." –David Feldman

Kennedy was 46 when he died, so he beat Elvis. He beat Marilyn Monroe, also. But Elvis and Marilyn both beat Mozart. Hell, everybody beats Mozart.

Except, no, not everybody does. Mozart was just shy of 36 when he died. James Dean was only 24 when he died. Sal Mineo barely beat the Mozart mark by a little over a year, while Natalie Wood was and august 43, when she died, thus rounding out the doomed "Rebel Without a Cause" crew. Nick Adams, friend of Elvis, who played "The Rebel" on television (and also appeared in the sixth Godzilla film for Toho studios), just barely passed the Mozart mark and died of an apparent drug overdose at 36.

Hollywood can chew them up fast. Heath Ledger wasn't yet 29 when he died recently. River Phoenix didn't even beat James Dean. Even Jimi Hendrix did better than that; he was 27 when he died, as was Janis Joplin, and Brian Jones, for that matter. Keith Moon was a relative oldster when he died at 32, as was John Bonham. None of them beat Mozart.

Buddy Holly was 22 when his plane crashed. Richie Valens was 27. Jiles Perry "J. P." Richardson, Jr., aka "The Big Bopper" was 28. The pilot was named Roger Peterson, who was 21.

Duane Allman was in James Dean territory, dying from a motorcycle accident a month shy of 24. His bandmate Berry Oakley managed to make it to the full 24 before dying in his motorcycle accident. The rest of the Allman Brothers gave up motorcycles after that.

Part of the "famous death" thing is that you have to have time to get famous, and that tends to favor the artists and the warriors. Shelly was shy of 30 when he died, but both Poe and Baudelaire still managed to beat Mozart. Keats didn't, though; he died at 25. Christopher Marlowe died at 29, although there are legends that say he just skipped town, like Elvis.

Évariste Galois, the mathematician died in a duel at the age of 20. Mathematics and politics do not mix.

Joan of Arc was 19 when she died, and that's pushing the envelope for someone to actually accomplish something before their deaths. Sure, King Tut was a teenager, but he just died and was buried with a lot of gold that didn't get graverobbed. And history is awash with young royals dying of a plague or a murderous plot before they came of age.

But we do have child actors, and such folks as Heather O'Roark, of Poltergeist fame. She was 12, and did not die of a drug overdose, or a set accident. She had congenital intestinal stenosis, and died of septic shock following successful surgery. She died too young. Almost everyone does.

Confession

I have a thing for libraries, as so many of us do. I spent my high school years haunting the Nashville Public Library, as part of the auto-didacticism that is required of anyone who aspires to an education. I consider libraries to be an essential part of civilization.

When I was at RPI, however, the RPI Library was substandard, I mean officially so. The accreditation authorities said as much in so many words. The book collections were pretty thin, there were an insufficient number of journals, and the building was at the very edge of the campus, symbolic of an attitude of “They’ve got textbooks; why would they want to read more than that?” The library building itself was an old “phony Gothic” stone chapel, and not really suited for a library building, being dark, cold, and prone to dampness. So that was a factor as well.

There seemed to be something of a consensus that a new building was needed. But there were those in the RPI Administration who were dragging their feet.

One symptom of it all was that there were two different committees that were supposed to give “input” on library matters to the administration, the Library Advisory Committee (LAC), and another one whose name escapes me. No matter, I joined them both. Such committees always have trouble filling their student slots, so it was pretty easy.

I won’t bore you with the details, because this essay isn’t about the RPI Library per se. Suffice it to say that there were many interesting turns of events, and the library even became a Student Rebellion issue for a while, generating a few “feel-good” stories in the local media. See? At other schools they’re doing silly things like protesting the war, but at RPI, they just want a better library. (There were some anti-war protests at RPI also, but why ruin a feel-good story with that sort of detail?)

Anyway, I wasn’t a student protest kinda guy; I was a writer. I wrote about the matter. I wrote an article in the RPI Engineer, a student magazine that, just coincidentally, I’d recently managed to get supplied to all the Engineering Faculty for free (One more advantage of being friends with the Dean of the School of Engineering). So it became fodder for some Faculty/Administration arguments.

I wrote the article in diary/journal format, dated entries, that sort of thing. One administrator reportedly got into a bit of trouble because of some of the things I’d written, although I rather suspect that it was more because he was on his way out anyway, for very different reasons.

Anyway, eventually the decision was made to build a new library. A large part of the money came from a donor who stipulated that it should be named after the retiring University President, who, ironically enough, had been the single greatest obstacle to the project from the beginning. There were a few snarky comments about this from those in the know, but mostly it was a matter of “Hell, for $10 million, he can name it after his left testicle for all I care.”

The old chapel building became the computer center, if you can believe it. They built a climate controlled structure inside of the old building, the stone walls acting as heat ballast to assist in the air conditioning.

Time passes. One of my college reunions happened to coincide with the anniversary of the ground breaking (or some other important date). There was a gathering of people who had something to do with the matter, including the architect (it had been his first major building, and had basically established his career), the aforementioned former RPI President, various committee chairmen, librarians, etc. And me.

So there were some speeches. And bedamned if just about every one of them didn’t read from my article about the committees, and the back and forth with the administration, and so forth.

So here’s the thing. I said that I wrote the article in diary format. But I didn’t keep a diary. Hell, I barely kept notes. Occasionally, when writing the article, I’d come to some point where I didn’t remember something, and I’d just keep writing. In other words, I made some stuff up.

I know, I know. There have been a bunch of scandals in recent years about journalists making stuff up, and how bad it is, and I agree, in principle. I’ll even stipulate that it’s no excuse to say that I wasn’t a professional journalist (although actually, at the time I was a stringer for McGraw-Hill’s technical news service), or that I’d never had a journalism class, where they might teach about journalistic ethics (ha!). Or even that I was young and young people do make mistakes.

And I’m certainly not going to try to alibi that what I was writing about wasn’t that important. They were minor details to me at the time, but who gets to say what is and is not minor in the long run?

I will say this, however. It was a long time ago, and by now, despite having a really good memory, I have absolutely no idea which of the details in my article weren’t true. And furthermore, neither does anyone else. I wrote the history of the matter, and there it rests. It’s probably as true as any other primary source, and I’ll stand by it. History is a human invention, in more ways than one.

Rainmaker on the Flood Plain

Sometimes he's hitching a ride in a freezer or appears as a mist
He's also been known to introduce himself as a scientist
He could be the retarded son of an old woman with
Seven fingers on each hand
'cos I know I reckon, he will come when he's beckoned for

Rainmaker's coming
Rainmaker's coming
Rainmaker's coming to soak us with water
To soak us with water
--Rainmaker, Sparklehorse

Rainmakers were big after the Civil War. The “Great American Desert,” east of the Rockies was renamed the “Great Plains” and the states of Kansas, Okalahoma, Nebraska, etc. were filling rapidly. The slogan “rain follows the plow” seems to have originated amongst climatologists, but it was rapidly employed by the railroads, who owned vast tracts of land on the Plains and who also stood to benefit from any trade generated by farm communities that were established.

Of course rains doesn’t follow the plow, and the Plains region is subject to periodic droughts. Eventually farmers tapped into the Ogallala Aquifer, and that’ll do them for another few decades, until a geological age’s worth of water is used up. Then we’ll be back to the situation those first farmers found themselves in, though presumably with a lot more tech.

The late 19th Century rainmakers tended to use cannons a lot. That fed into the lingering belief that cannons caused rain; it certainly must have seemed like that to Union soldiers who’d never seen Deep South weather before. And if the rainmaker got lucky, some rain did come during his brief tenure in whatever small town had hired him. Then he looked like a hero, or maybe even a god.

But I started this dance and a storm kicked up
The sky went black from coast to coast
It was too late to stop - it was too late to pray
I had summoned down the Holy Ghost
Oh the searing wind and the clouds of dust
And hell came raining down
What came out of me and the powers that be
Was the last of that one horse town
--Rainmaker, Kansas

There were, of course, stories of rainmakers who’d been too successful, and sometimes floods do occur out on the Great Plains. But the term “Rainmaker” has come to mean the Guy With the Mojo, the one who brings business into the consultancy, the law firm, or the accountancy. In other words, the guy who does the Marketing.

The story goes that Orville Redenbacher’s first attempts to sell his new hybrid popcorn were not successful. It was called RedBow, after Redenbacher and his partner, Charlie Bowman, and it was more expensive than regular popcorn. An advertising/marketing consulting firm suggested that Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popcorn was a much better name, and the rest is history.

Redenbacher supposedly once said, “My mother gave me the name 50 years ago, and she didn’t charge me $13,000 for it.” Yeah, but neither did she give him the wit to use it, either, though he apparently knew a good idea when he heard it. Or maybe Charlie Bowman did.

Rainmaker, rainmaker
The sky is gray just by the touch of your hand
Rainmaker, rainmaker
Make me some rain, make all my crops grow tall
--Rainmaker, Traffic (Winwood/Capaldi)

It does occur to me to wonder, though, what good is a rainmaker without farmers and a drought? In California, an unseasonable rain can ruin some crops. A rainmaker in the upper Amazon is just silly, worse than useless really.

There is that tendency to focus on the Star and not the surrounding planetary nebula. Well, sure, the Star is singular and there are so many lesser bodies surrounding it. But what happens if the town has two or three rainmakers? How about a dozen? At some point you hit diminishing returns. At some later point, it becomes actively dangerous.

When we listen to the Rainmaker story
Then we listen to a song that never ends
When we listen to the Rainmaker story
We're in the end only points on a scale for the Rainmaker
--Rainmaker, Vanden Plas, (Lill/Kuntz)

There’s a river named Stones River that runs near Donelson, where I grew up. Farther upstream, near Murfreesboro, it was site to one of the great battles of the Civil War (though I sometimes wonder if there were any minor battles to that war, at least to hear the locals hear about it). Between Stones River National Battlefield and Donelson sits Percy Priest Lake, created by Percy Priest Dam. The dam was one of the last hurrahs of the Army Corps of Engineers and the TVA, with an awful lot of the “benefit” in the cost/benefit ratio being “recreation.” Well, I do know guys who take their boats out on it a lot.

The flood plain for Stones River in Donelson is very obvious when you’re driving out Lebanon Rd. (Pike on the maps, but we always said “road”) toward Hermitage. A few years after the dam went up, construction began on a lot of houses, condos, and a country club in the flood plain. I imagine it’s safe enough; modern dams rarely break or overflow. Right?

I wonder what it's like to be the Rainmaker
I wonder what it's like to know that I make the rain
I'd store it in boxes with little yellow tags on everyone
And you can come see them when I'm... done, when I'm done
--Rainmaker, Matchbox 20

As I said, these days the Rainmaker is the marketing guy, or the star with the reputation that brings in the business. I’ve seen that up close and personal in the consulting biz, and it’s rarely the Rainmaker who winds up doing the work. Usually, that falls to the new-kids-just-out-of-school, because they’re cheap, so you load the contract up with their hours in order to be low bid. So the Rainmaker turns into just the Front, the public face of the firm, while the twenty and early thirty-somethings put in the all-nighters. Sometimes it works, and you get some real talent just out of school. Sometimes it doesn’t. Most of the time it doesn’t matter, because the study is going to get buried anyway. Sometimes the study is meant to fail; and boy, do they get pissed if it comes out with some real results.

More generally, what does it say about an economy that depends on marketing, the way agriculture depends on rain? I never believed John Kenneth Galbraith when he claimed that “demand” in the American economy was mostly artifice, with advertising and marketing being able to create consumption where none would naturally exist. I mean, you know, New Coke.

But a few examples of spectacular failures don’t invalidate the hypothesis as such. When all the social pressures are to live in the right place, drive an impressive vehicle, give the gifts, buy the toys, chase after that inevitable brass ring, it’s worth re-examining the question every now and then. It’s always worth wondering when the aquifer is going to run dry.

Me, I seem to have a talent for cool titles; whether or not what follows lives up to the advance billing is always in doubt.

You tell me we can start the rain. You tell me that we all can change
You tell me we can find something to wash the tears away. You tell me we can start the rain
You tell me that we all can change. You tell me we can find something to wash the tears.
--Rainmaker, Iron Maiden

Castro

"Are you such a loser you can't tell when you've won?" –Jacob, From Dusk Till Dawn.

Anyone wanting to see some background to this, can visit Brad Delong's blog, here:

I first ran into the curious fact that Cuba had close to the lowest infant mortality statistics in Latin America over a decade ago, when I was boning up on epidemiology, partly as the result of a small contract I had, but also just because I do things like that every now and then.

In fact, Cuba's infant mortality rate is a bit lower than that of the United States. There are various claims that are made as to the source of this relatively minor statistical discrepancy, including noting that there are more low birth weight births in the U.S. due to a greater number of premature births, possibly as the result of more intensive pre-natal medical intervention. I'd be more receptive to such arguments were it not for the fact that non-Hispanic whites in the U.S. have a lower infant mortality rate than does Cuba overall, but infant mortality in African-Americans is more than double that of Cuba. For Native Americans it's about 50% higher than non-Hispanic whites, with considerable variation among tribal groups. Similarly, infant mortality is higher in some sections of the country overall, especially in the Southeast, but this may reflect the greater African American population there.

Of course, mentioning these facts immediately leads some to begin talking about "fetal alcohol syndrome," "crack babies," poor nutrition, etc. In the United States, you see, there are very few public health issues; it's always a matter of individual choices and responsibilities.

We're all such rugged individualists, you see. We cauterize our wounds by pouring gunpowder in them and then lighting it.

Anyway, I also noticed that, in any given academic article that addressed the issue of Cuban infant mortality, there was an obligatory first paragraph or two, explaining that Castro was, nevertheless, a Very Bad Person, a dictator, for heaven's sake, and the author certainly should not be taken as an Apologist for Castro. That would apparently make the author a communist, or at least a Left Wing something or other.

In "Rethinking Communism," I remarked on the fact that you can easily trace the outlines of the old USSR in southern Asia by looking at literacy statistics. The Russian Communists believed in teaching children to read, and they did something about it. And literacy, no matter what we'd like to think, is not a given. It requires some public policy decisions to result in a high literacy rate, and it requires a commitment of resources.

Cuba also has a high literacy rate, again, one of the highest in Latin America, a bit higher than that of Mexico, or even Costa Rica, and 'way higher than Guatemala, The Dominican Republic, or Haiti, to name some other countries that have had the benefit of U.S. invasions over the years. The Duchy of Grand Fenwick would not have been so keen on losing a war with the U.S. if they'd been in Latin America, I think.

So here we have Cuba, a dirt poor country, whether owing to the inherent inefficiencies in a centrally planned Communist economy, or to the fact that it has the most militarily powerful country in the world just a few miles away, trying to cut off all its trade, occasionally making invasion plans, and certainly requiring it to maintain a military far greater than it would otherwise need. (And let's stipulate here that Cuba also tried exporting its revolution and lent some of that military to Soviet purposes in Africa; I'm not trying to make the case that Castro is the Good Guy here). Yet Cuba, this dirt poor country, has managed to nevertheless maintain a effective structure of public heath and education.

Again, I don't think that this is all that mysterious. Those who make the decisions of public policy in Cuba decided that these things were a priority. In fact, you could argue that cutting off other, entrepreneurial avenues of advancement in Cuba, actually assisted the public health and education priorities, diverting manpower into those areas. I might personally think that you can do a better job with a richer economic base and a bit less labor input, but I'm not absolutely sure that this was an option.

Another thing that I'm pretty sure of is that ideas like "democracy" are rather secondary to the whole anti-communism thing. I don't want to try to gin up some sort of body count comparison between Cuba and, say, Guatemala, or to compare Pinochet to Castro. But it's undeniable that the United States routinely subverted (to put it mildly) democratically elected governments during the Cold War, in favor of dictators who were more "anti-communist." And this habit continues; how many people in the U.S. think it matters that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the elected President of Iran? Hell, how many even know that he was elected? Or that it isn't even the most powerful office in Iran? Very few, by the looks of things. Ahmadinejad's sole purpose, for U.S. foreign policy, seems to be to serve as a boogieman, someone to frighten the kids with.

Besides, if an election gives the wrong results, there are ways to make it all come out right.

But there is one other thing that has occurred to me in this ruminating-on-Castro thing, and that is this: the big foreign policy mistakes made by the U.S. concerning Castro were made in the early 1960s, on Kennedy's watch. There are those who try to blame the Eisenhower Administration, or even, so help me, Nixon (because Nixon was given such a lot of power during Ike's term, 'cause Ike trusted him so much). But Kennedy gave the go-ahead, and he did it because part of his thing was being as much of a "Cold Warrior" as anyone. The Cold War was not the invention of the Right Wing, they were the crazies who wanted a hot war. They were the "it's okay if that last two people left after nuclear war are Americans," people.

The Cold War was a product of American Liberalism. The Right learned to love it, or at least loved the anti-communist witch hunts. But Cuba was a bi-partisan screwup, and I think there's a lot of guilt still buried there. Some people are indeed such losers that they can't tell when they've won.

Rethinking Communism

"Communism didn't fall. It was pushed." – George H. W. Bush, July 2, 1992

I've noticed that, whenever anyone wants to give the devil his due, they first must stand up and announce in a loud voice that it is, in fact, the very devil we're dealing with, so bad, bad, bad, old devil, and then they can say what they set out to say. I've seen this in action where people analyze the infant mortality rates in Cuba, which are far lower than any other country in Latin America and close to those of the U.S., but Castro is a bad, bad man, so let's be sure we get that in. Similarly, if one wishes to locate where in south central Asia the USSR has occupied, now or in the past, one can find a very good map of it by just looking at literacy rates, as compared to the neighboring countries, with the former USSR countries having over 97% literacy rates. The outlier is Afghanistan, which, despite a violent and unsuccessful occupation by the USSR in the 1980s, nevertheless saw large increases in both male (increasing from 30% to over 40%) and female (6% to about 15%) literacy during that time.




But communism, especially in the Russian and Chinese models, was an authoritarian political form that demanded a single Party state, censorship, secret police, and all the trappings that gave George Orwell the heebie jeebies. Bad old Commies.

So let's pretend, somehow, that it's possible to divorce communism from those things. What do we have left? Can we somehow rewind the tape and start all over again from the French Revolution and the Paris Commune and somehow get it to work better? Ah, that seems pretty dubious, so that's probably a dead end.

Still, from my recent review of the French Revolution (granted, more the Cliff Notes version than anything deep or substantive), one of the things that stuck was the degree to which foreign intervention kept the pot on the boil. The monarchies in the rest of Europe felt that they could not afford to let the French Revolution succeed; the American Revolution was bad enough, and that was just a slaveholder rebellion as far as many Europeans were concerned. The Americans were half a world away, besides. But this new French thing…no, best to nip it in the bud.

And even Napoleon, who rose like a cork from the stormy sea, well, he named himself Emperor and put his cronies in charge of things. They may have despised the little twerp, but at least Napoleon they understood.

So what about Soviet Russia? Well, again, was there ever a time when the Western powers just let it ride? The Red and White armies marched all over hell and gone in the 1920s, and not without plenty of outside interference and support for various factions. In the twenty years before the Second World War, Europe looked like a tossup match between Communism and Fascism, and liberal democracy was hardly considered worthy of a seat at the debate. The Hitler/Stalin pact looks insane at this distance (and was a head bender at the time, as well), but I've seen it explained as the natural outcome of Stalin's actually being a real Communist. He considered England to be the real enemy, and it was trivial for Hitler to play on that. Hitler had his own delusions, of course; he viewed England as a natural ally, and thought the British royalty (who were "racial Germans," after all) would swing his way.

Then, big war, one that wiped out almost an entire generation of Russian males, followed by the Cold War. England had spent itself in the war, and divested itself of its colonial empire, in a series of moves so ham fisted that they guaranteed several generations of blood and conflict in the former colonies. But hey, that's the White Man's Burden, isn't it?

The United States took up the great cause of anti-communism, though, and wasn't that a peach? We built up an Armageddon arsenal of nuclear weapons, and then, when the Russians got themselves a bomb or ten, the U.S. went absolutely batshit berserk, seeing Communists under every bed, with neighbor denouncing neighbor, lives ruined on rumor, and drunken old Joe McCarthy scaring the pants off of everyone. In college I knew a few old lefties who'd been through that wringer, and it's not something I ever want to see up close and personal. After 9/11 people were killed for just wearing turbans. Imagine how it would have been if the mark of Cain had been belonging to some club in college 10 or 20 years ago. In other words, imagine if it could be _you_ under the hammer.

It also makes me wonder what sort of derangement would have resulted if the U.S. had actually been _invaded_ in WWII, or if the first ones with the nukes had been some other country, which is to say, if the U.S. had experienced even a fraction of what the USSR went through. But, of course, trying to imagine the world from the perspective of a "godless communist" is exactly the sort of thing that could have gotten you blacklisted in 1950.

Exactly what is it that created the Cold War? The Russians grabbed a lot of land in eastern Europe, I get that. They supposedly threatened Western Europe militarily, I get that, too. But it's not as if there wasn’t a "vice versa" there as well.

And as nearly as I can tell, nothing justifies the general plan that seems to have been in place for "containment" of communism, which, in practice, worked out to replacing democratically elected governments with authoritarian dictatorships that were "friendly" to the West, which is to say the U.S., which is to say U.S. commercial interests. The list of those is long and brutal, and we all know who they were. The other option seems to have been putting a lot of U.S. soldiers into the place, as hostages. That was pretty much how it was for Germany and South Korea.

For the life of me it looks like the United States and the European democracies simply didn't believe in their own forms of government. Democratic principles were (and still are) considered "weak," things to be replaced by authoritarian command-and-control whenever things got tough, or scary, or even hard to understand.

My own belief is that the USSR fell because of the generation gap. The War Generation (the Russians had a "greatest generation" of their own, after all), got old, and boring, and the young elites of Russia saw the cool stuff that was going on elsewhere in the world and they wanted a piece of it. They wanted sex and drugs and rock and roll, just like every other younger generation in the history of the world. So as the new technocrats took over, they just let the whole communism thing slip away. I imagine the same thing happened in China; Tiananmen Square was an urban youth rebellion, put down by soldiers drawn from the countryside—the Chinese Red States, if you will.

From time to time, I see someone writing about the "internal contradictions" of Russian Communism, and the "inefficiency" of the Soviet economic system. I think that there are truths buried in there, but I have to observe that an oligarchic command-and-control structure is the model for every corporation in America. And yes, corporations do go bankrupt, and they do get bought out, but the same can be said for the USSR. And corporations generally don't have to have their own armies, and they don't have foreign governments trying to subvert their every move.

I do believe in those things that we all wave at when we talk about "freedom" and "democratic principles." I just wish that I were more certain that the rest of my countrymen did.

One Tank Counted a Million Times

My friend Murray is Jewish, as are a lot of friends of mine from RPI, because RPI gets a lot of smart kids from the northeast, especially New York City, Long Island, and Philadelphia. Murray’s father, Meyer, was originally from Poland, spent the last part of WWII in a Soviet labor camp (a lucky thing, considering the alternative), and had the sense to stay on the last train out of Poland at the end of the war, rather than going back home to the last Polish pogrom. You thought that only the Nazis were killing Jews in 1945?

Once, during one of my extended visits with Murray, his brother Sol decided to do an oral history of the family and got out a tape recorder to get some of Meyer’s stories down for posterity. Because I was the only one in attendance who hadn’t heard the stories, Meyer basically told them to me, which I’ve always considered quite a privilege. One of them, for reasons that will be obvious, always stuck in my mind.

It was from the Soviet labor camp, a frontier post out in a Siberian forest, cutting trees to supply wood for the war effort. The conditions were as brutal as you might imagine, though, since timber output was the main purpose, the camp wasn’t deliberately for the purpose of killing people. Nevertheless, no one in authority cared much when someone died, and sometimes the prescribed rules had that effect.

One particularly pernicious rule was the timber quota/food ration rule. Basically, if a work gang didn’t meet their timber quota, their food rations were cut. Since the rations were barely subsistence anyway, cutting them would render the workers even weaker, more sluggish, less able to work, than before, which would result in more lost quotas, more cuts, etc. spiraling downward into starvation and death. So the quotas had to be met at all costs.

The problem was that the quotas kept being increased, until finally, even fully healthy workers would have been unable to meet them. Again, this wasn’t done with the express purpose of killing anyone; it would just have had that effect.

However, Meyer was the straw boss, and he concocted a plan. The crew would work until noon, cutting as many trees as they could. During the brief lunch period, Meyer would count how many trees had been cut, and calculate how many more they needed after lunch to meet quota. Then, after lunch, the crew would go back over the previous day’s cut logs and saw off the very ends of the logs—where the inspectors had stamped the previous day’s logs with a mark to indicate that the logs had been counted. The log ends would go onto the camp fires, and the inspectors would go over the day’s cut and double count the trees whose marks had been removed.

Now obviously there were probably some inspectors who figured out what was happening, but no one said anything. It wasn’t their jobs to say anything; their jobs were to count the logs with no stamps and to stamp the logs. Nothing more. If they piped up, they risked having their superiors get angry, since all their superiors were interested in was making the quotas as well.

“The whole system was like that,” Meyer said. “If they tell you they have a million tanks, don’t believe them. They have one tank; they count it a million times.”

Malleus Maleficarum

I’ve been groping for a suitably pithy phrase to describe the Malleus Maleficarum. “Vile Epic?” “Tribute to psychosexual projection?” “Classic Hate Screed?” “Grim grimoire?” I admit defeat on this point.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches), was written by two Dominican monks, Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, sometime between 1485 and 1487. Kramer and Sprenger had been named as witch hunters in a Papal decree in 1484 and they seem to have made a job of it. However, their work was not without controversy, and the Malleus itself was first condemned by the University of Cologne, then later put on the Church’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the banned book index. Despite this (or possibly because of it), the Malleus became an early bestseller, and served as a bible for witch hunters in Europe for the next several centuries. It should be noted that, because of the Church’s condemnation of it, the book was used more by Protestant witch hunters than Catholics.

I doubt that there is any reading of “cultural relativism” that would concede that the Malleus can be taken at face value—as an objective portrayal of the habits and practices of witches. On the other hand, there are probably at least 20% of the inhabitants of the U.S. who would declare that the Malleus is true (and I shudder to think of the degree to which the 20% may be an underestimate).

However, I’m obviously not writing anything for that fraction of the populace, so we’ll begin with the observation that most of the text is just made up. So here we bring to bear the notions of projective psychology. Invented text (including fiction by me and thee) is projective in nature, and so displays a great deal about the interior landscape of those who are inventing it, by whatever means.

In the case of Kramer and Sprenger, the analysis is complicated by the manner in which they produced the text. Much of it was reportedly the result of their inquisition and the methods used. To put it bluntly, a good part of it was probably produced by persons under duress, torture in other words. So here you have an unusual collaborative process. Those who are tortured attempt to tell the torturers what they want to hear, but that in itself adds yet another projective layer into the process.

Jung seldom writes of the “collective unconscious” as the product of torture, but there it is. Indeed, the folk process in all its forms requires more psychic energy than is required to merely dream or view an inkblot. Communication must occur and the impetus for communication is often more violent than we’d like to think.

The book itself is ugly and humorless, a compendium of misogynistic sadomasochistic projection. It is also a record of tales of the witch inquisition itself, and, given our own beliefs that people cannot actually raise hailstorms by pissing into a trench or fly through the air on demonic power, the record of persons being burned at the stake for these activities does cause revulsion. In such cases, one tends to cling to the hope that the entire matter was entirely fictional.

Generally speaking, witches in the Malleus seem to spend an ungodly amount of time raising hailstorms, roasting and eating babies, and copulating with the devil or his incubi and succubae. Interestingly, there don’t seem to have been many homosexual witches; Lucifer apparently didn’t tumble to that bit of fun until modern times, or maybe the monks didn’t consider it to be as essentially sinful as women.

In any case, the Malleus virtually demands the classic Freudian interpretation of repressed sexuality getting all gnarly, then escaping in all sorts of projective behavior. Our recent dance with “repressed memory” and “Satanic Ritual abuse” contains practically all of the important parts of the fantasies contained in the Malleus, right on down to the baby eating. It’s worth noting that such fantasies play a big role in the psychopathology of anti-Semitism as well, and Protocols of the Elders of Zion makes an interesting companion piece to the Malleus Maleficarum. If I wanted to write a really sick and twisted horror novel, those two are where I’d start.

Crimes Against the Humanities

The destruction of the Library at Alexandria is often attributed, by Christians, to Muslim Caliph Omar, who supposedly ordered that all the books in the library should be destroyed because, "they will either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous." It is also said that the legend of Caliph Omar was promulgated by Saladin, who found the precedent convenient when he himself needed to destroy a library.

Earlier, however, in 391, Christian Emperor Theodosius I ordered the destruction of all pagan temples, and the Christian Patriarch Theophilus of Alexandria is said to have complied with this request. There were also anti-Persian riots in the city at that time, which may have produced the real destruction.

The first personage accused of the library's destruction, is Julius Caesar, more or less by accident, when he sacked and burned Alexandria harbor.

Iconoclasm (Eikonoklasmos, "Image-breaking") is the name of the heresy in the eighth and ninth centuries primarily affected the Eastern (Byzantine) Church. It was among the last of the breaches with Rome that prepared the way for the schism of Photius. There was a lesser outbreak of idol smashing/art vandalism in the Frankish kingdom in the Western (Roman) Church.

Later, during the Reformation, iconoclasm was one of the many new/old facets that Protestantism presented to the world. Iconoclastic riots took place in Zürich (in 1523), Copenhagen (1530), Münster (1534), Geneva (1535), Augsburg (1537), and Scotland (1559). And event called "Beeldenstorm" took place in what is now the Netherlands, Belgium and parts of Northern France. This outbreak of iconoclasm included such acts as the destruction of the statuary of the Monastery of Saint Lawrence in Steenvoorde after a "Hagenpreek", or field sermon, by Sebastiaan Matte; and the sacking of the Monastery of Saint Anthony after a sermon by Jacob de Buysere.

Significant destruction of artworks and manuscripts also took place in the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Some were anti-religious and anti-clerical; many were directed at more secular targets, especially tax and debt records.

Upon the death of Sir Richard Burton, his widow proceeded to burn most of his notes, diaries, and some unknown number of manuscripts, including a translation of "The Perfumed Garden." Some say it was for fear of his soul and as part of a campaign to portray him as a good Catholic. Others say it was on Burton's own instructions. Either way, we'll never read his translation of The Perfumed Garden.

There is an apocryphal tale, probably started by Mark Twain, that in the latter part of the 19th Century, steam engines in Egypt were fueled by burning mummies. Whether or not ancient (or modern, the desert is still used for mummification) mummies were every used for fuel or kindling, there was a painter's pigment of the time called "Mummy Brown," which was, in fact, made from powdered mummy. Also, mummies removed from the dry climate of Egypt tend to grow rot, and such was the fate of many that made their way to Europe during the Colonial Era.

Twain also described American tourists taking chips off of the Pyramids and other grand artifacts as "souvenirs." That one has the ring of truth to it.

In 1687, the Venetians, under Francesco Morosini attacked Athens, and the Ottomans fortified the Acropolis and used the Parthenon as a gunpowder magazine. On September 26, a Venetian mortar, fired from the Hill of Philopappus, blew the magazine up and the building was partly destroyed. Francesco Morosini then proceeded to attempt to loot sculptures from the now ruin. The internal structures were demolished, whatever was left of the roof collapsed, and some of the pillars, particularly on the southern side, were decapitated. The sculptures suffered heavily.

Historically, the greatest cause of damage to existing marble sculptures in Europe has been acid rain and fog during the middle to late 20th Century.

Most of the golden artifacts of the Aztecs and Inca peoples were melted down for their metal content.

Thomas Bowdler was an English physician who published an expurgated edition of William Shakespeare's work that he considered to be more appropriate than the original for women and children. He similarly edited Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. His name is now associated with prudish censorship of literature, motion pictures and television programs.

Some estimates place the number of languages in Pre-Columbian America as high as a thousand. Only a handful remain.

In the early days of talking pictures, the older silent films were considered useless, and many of the highly combustible films were used as kindling for the bonfires and similar events.

In the early twentieth century, Zionist immigrants in Palestine tried to eradicate the use of Yiddish amongst their own population, and make its use socially unacceptable. State authorities in the young Israel of the 1950s went to the extent of using censorship laws inherited from British rule in order to prohibit or extremely limit Yiddish theater in Israel.

The Buddhas of Bamiyan were two monumental statues of standing Buddhas carved into the side of a cliff in the Bamyan valley of central Afghanistan, situated 230 km (143 miles) northwest of Kabul at an altitude of 2500 meters (8,202 feet). Built during the sixth century, the statues represented the classic blended style of Indo-Greek art. They were dynamited by the Taliban in Afghanistan in March 2001.

In 1969, when I was away at college, a combination of foundation work and an untimely storm flooded the family basement. My mother saved my comic book collection

Blowback

I don't really know enough European history. It's long, it's complicated, and in the end, it often comes down to a some guys who really hated each other getting large numbers of people killed.

I admit that's something of an oversimplification.

In any case, much of what follows comes from some conversations I've had with Dave Stout, a fellow who knows his history far better than I do. However, all errors that follow are mine, because that's the way this goes.

The American Revolution was a wondrous thing from European eyes, reflecting (or at least seeming to) the ideology of The Enlightenment, with all the rights of man, scientific principles, etc. that were so much in fashion. There was also the "Nostalgie de la Boue" thing that Tom Wolfe has written about, literally, "Nostalgia for the Mud" but more figuratively, the "romanticizing of primitive souls." I remember a tale from high school history (and hence very suspect) that Ben Franklin's first appearance before the court of France came before he'd had a chance to unpack, so he could not wear his powdered wig. His naked head charmed the French aristos, him being a child of the wilderness and all. And so clever.

So old Ben became a Rock Star in his seventies, in Paris, and took to just a charming anyone who'd come around, including, it was rumored (and kinda said outright by John Adams) practically anyone in a skirt. I find it difficult to be shocked. Or, for that matter, surprised.

There was apparently something of an "egalitarian" fad before the French Revolution, with all sorts of aristocrats and privileged folk deciding that it would be a good idea to get to know their servants and others among the "little people." I'm bound to wonder if that helped or hurt their chances when the great guillotine lottery came to town. I can see it going either way. It's a "laws and sausages" thing from either side.

The French Revolution scared everybody in Europe, and by "everybody" I mean all the powerful folks whose necks began to itch at odd intervals. France itself was a mess; one of the features of the American Revolution was that, if things got too feisty in one area or another, a bunch of folk would just pull up stakes and move on. In France, there wasn't really any "on" to move to. It also turns out that all those principles of The Enlightenment, can squish around as much as Biblical text in producing whatever result one has in mind. Who knew?

Anyway, France had been at war with various other European powers for quite a while prior to the Revolution; the King's military spending was, in fact, one of the commonly cited factors for the country's near bankruptcy, which in turn gave the Revolution a good headlong shove. Add to that the fact that there was this grand social experiment going on (one which was explicitly rejecting the "divine right of Kings," and, for that matter, "the diving right of the Pope"), and the surrounding countries were not neutral observers.

So there followed a series of "Coalitions" amongst the Great Nations of Europe, sending armies to bite off as much of France as the situation would allow, and if the Revolution could be forced into collapse, so much the better.

The problem was, and here I specifically note Dave's excellent imagery, the "Coalitions" generally amounted to coming at France more or less the same way that ninja come at Bruce Lee in a Kung Fu movie, i.e. without much in the way of coordination. Britain could more or less kick anybody's ass at sea, but the land campaigns from Italy, Prussia, Austria, et al. were of the "our guys will just go in and brush them aside" (I'm unable to find a direct Dr. Strangelove link) sorts of deals. So they kept losing.

And as they were losing, the best commanders and tacticians in the French military (now cleared of a lot of deadwood by the aforementioned guillotine) were rising to the occasion. And rising in rank.

Napoleon is the obvious result, but there were a number of other pretty smart guys who gave a pretty good show, like Carnot, Jourdan, Moreau, and the like. Napoleon just happened to be the cream of the cream, and his nationality (Corsica being Italian, well, okay, Genoan, until it's purchase by France in 1768) made it easy for him to snap up Italy early on.

He eventually overreached, as so many do, and that story is pretty well known, what with the Russian winter, massive loss of men, and exile to palindromic Elba. Then there was the "over the hill boxer coming out of retirement" deal, and "The Hundred Days" ending in Waterloo, blah, blah, blah. There was also a thing called "The Holy Alliance" (catchy name; it got reused), that tried to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, and managed to do pretty well, provided you ignored the fact that a number of the new kings and other royals weren't quite exactly who they would have been before Napoleon.

So we get the 19th Century, with the nations of Europe playing Risk with the rest of the world, all the while all the Royals looked over their shoulders, wary of the next mob, the next Commune, the next guillotine, or the next Napoleon. Actually, they didn't mind the next Napoleon so much, since he put scotch to the second French Republic. Besides it was those damned Republics that they really hated, and all those weird democratic notions that The Enlightenment had put out there.

The next grand "popular fashion" was a romanticization of war, an epidemic of war fever, and what was called at the time, The Great War.

Some didn't think it so great, but you've got to break some eggs to make some Dada.

In The Great War, aka WWI, we had the famous sealed train sending Lenin into Russia to make as much trouble as possible (they had a low estimate on what "as possible" meant). The Brits carved up the Ottoman Empire into what they considered manageable bites, and they missed that by a margin as well. The U.S. backed a lot of petty dictators because they were "bulwarks against communism" and for those efforts we got a theocratic Iran, after the Shah fell, theocratic Afghanistan (because, really, what kind of harm could a bunch or armed fanatical Muslims do to us?), and (in case I've been too subtle) a nuclear Pakistan teetering on the brink of collapse because it turns out that when you invade or otherwise meddle in other countries, there can be unexpected consequences.

Well, who would have expected that?

Chain Gang

It's oddly difficult to get information about the chain gang system that existed in the South until the 1950s and 60s. There are a few famous exposes, plus the pop culture images of "I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang," or "The Defiant Ones," or "Cool Hand Luke." There are an awful lot of white faces in these movies.

I was in our back yard in Tennessee sometime in the mid-50s when I saw a work gang in leg irons working on Emory Drive across the vacant lot that abutted our back yard. There were no white faces in that crowd.

The convict labor system was the way that southern states kept their roads repaired for most of the first half of the 20th Century. I've seen claims that the chain gangs were integrated, despite a fully segregated prison system, but I'm bound to wonder how much of that integrated chain gang image came from ignorance and poetic license. There was no mystery about how the prison labor system worked: whenever a road contractor needed labor, the local constabulary rounded up all the "vagrants" in the area, and vagrants were almost invariably black. Putting a white man in a largely black work gang would have been considered appalling.

Perhaps the gangs that were made up of prison inmates, rather than local "pick up" labor were different, but again, how and why would there be a mixing of populations that were not even in the same prisons? The logistics alone make the idea dubious; it would have been a lot like "forced busing," wouldn't it?

As for the pop culture images, there's no question about the dynamic at work there. There would have been no audiences for a film that featured only black characters, whereas adding black men to the mix either allows a statement about racial issues, or it emphasizes the degradation of the main (white) character.

In any case, I've just spent some time on Google Images, looking for a photo of a real chain gang with both black and white men in it, and I couldn't find any. I never saw one in real life, either.

The movie, "I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang," was based on a book, I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang. The State of Georgia banned the movie. I don't think they did it because it showed chain gangs; I think they banned it because it showed one that was integrated.

1968 Part II

June 3 - Radical feminist Valerie Solanas shoots Andy Warhol as he enters his studio, wounding him.

June 5 - U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy is shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California by TAWKRFK. Kennedy dies from his injuries the next day.

The Wikipedia says that The Central Intelligence Agency's Phoenix Program was officially established in June, 1968, but the article on the Program itself says that it began in 1967. Since, among other things, it involved assassination and interrogation by harsh methods (i.e. torture), it's easy to see how basic information about the program is suspect.

In the summer of 1968, I was working full time as a lifeguard at the Downtown Nashville YMCA. Actually, that is an understatement. The other certified and experience Y lifeguards had all gotten nice summer jobs at suburban pools, where they made more money and got to meet girls. This left me as the only lifeguard that the Downtown Y had to fill the high chair.

The pool was open 6 days a week, for 12 hours each day, although I sometimes got there a little late, and I was allowed to leave early if there was no one wanting to use the pool past 5. Still I was working as much as 72 hours a week for less than minimum wage.

On the plus side, it was easy work; there would sometimes be stretches of well over an hour with no one in the pool at all. And during the swim classes, the main safety responsibility fell to the instructors, so I was sometimes allowed to duck over to the café and have lunch.

Also, because of the hours, I didn't really have much of a chance to spend money. So I saved several hundred dollars that summer, despite having weekly paychecks that seldom cracked $50.

July 23-July 28 - African-American militants led by Fred (Ahmed) Evans engage in a fierce gunfight with police in the Glenville Shootout of Cleveland, Ohio.

July 25 - Pope Paul VI publishes the encyclical entitled Humanae Vitae, condemning birth control.

August 5-August 8 - The Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida nominates Richard Nixon for U.S. President and Spiro Agnew for Vice President.

Nixon was selling "The New Nixon" a forthright soul who had wandered the wilderness and who was now past the slush funds, sweaty brow, and "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore."

But really now, everyone knew he was still an asshole. The only thing was that he was an asshole who hadn't tried yet to get us killed. Lyndon Johnson, however, had been trying to get us killed for quite a while.

Besides, George Romney, the Republican anti-war candidate, shot himself in the feet so many times that he could have used them as colanders.

In late August police clashed with antiwar protesters in Chicago, Illinois outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention, which nominates Hubert Humphrey for U.S. President, and Edmund Muskie for Vice President. Richard Nixon was to use the Democratic debacle to great advantage, speaking of the "silent majority" and disparagingly of "the Hippies" which everyone took to mean anyone who had any opposition to the war, any desire for sex, drugs, and rock and roll, or any white male who had hair that managed to creep over his ears. In other words, me, about six months after leaving Nashville. But I'm getting ahead of myself. In any event, I'm not the guy to ask about the Chicago DNC riots. For that, you want Skip Williamson.

[Brief aside: In Tom Brokaw's 1968, he gets a former Chicago cop and a former anti-war activist together to have at it a bit. The Chicago cop claims that there were park benches being burned during the riots. The activist says that the story is a "total urban myth." The cop replies, "I was there," and the segment ends.

Why the hell didn't Brokaw follow up on this? It's pretty easy to find, for example, photos of park benches being piled up as barricades, but I'm damned if I can find a single burning bench photo, or even a reference to it. Which is to say that the cop was almost certainly lying, or, more likely, remembering something that never happened. And Brokaw lets it pass, as if finding out who was telling the truth would be" taking sides."

Asshole.]

In September, 1968, I arrived at Rensselear Polytechnic Institute. My parents drove me the 1050 miles to get there, and "Classical Gas" by Mason Williams was larded onto the top 40 stations with a trowel. I remember waking to it somewhere in Baltimore, near the middle of the night, from being asleep in the back of the station wagon.

Somewhere in the first semester at RPI, Jean Shepherd performed in the gym, and asked his audience, "How many of you here believe that your life hasn't started yet?" Many hands went up, with some amusement. Shepherd proceeded to tell them what idiots they were, waiting for it to begin. I had not raised my hand. I figured that my life had begun with my arrival at RPI. I was wrong, of course; I'd had a life in Nashville. But I was also right; it wasn't the life I wanted.

That first semester, I learned how to drink. The legal age for alcohol in New York State at the time was 18, and since no freshmen were allowed to have automobiles, it wasn't even that dangerous. The RPI Student Union Rathskeller served cheap beer to anyone with a student ID, and there were a set of bars down in Troy that specifically catered to students. I made a hit with some of my buddies by knowing that common detergent contains optical bleach, which reflects UV as blue-white light. The bars had a cover charge, but used a UV ink stamp on the back of your hand to allow re-entry. A little bit of detergent, properly painted (one kind barfly loaned us her eyebrow brush; she probably found one of us attractive, but I have no idea which of us it was, which means it may have been me, dammit) saved you the cover charge.

On September 7, Women's Liberation groups, joined by members of New York NOW, targeted the Miss America Beauty Contest in Atlantic City. The protest included theatrical demonstrations including ritual disposal of traditional female roles into the "freedom ashcan." While nothing is actually set on fire, one organizer's comment - quoted in the New York Times the next day - that the protesters "wouldn't do anything dangerous, just a symbolic bra-burning," created a mass perception, and everyone now remembers the bras being burned.

RPI legend has it that the proper spelling of nerd is "knurd", which is "drunk" spelled backwards, dating from the time when you were one or the other. But some knurds drank, and besides, something new had been added to the mix. The RPI class of 1972, which arrived in 1968, already had a goodly pothead component, the younger brothers of those who had already gone to college, or those simply from places where marijuana culture had hit the high schools. It was only a year or two after that that drugs hit Donelson High, or so says my sister. There may have been somewhere in the country further behind the curve than Donelson, but it's hard to imagine such a place.

I liked hanging with the heads, but I did not indulge my freshman year. I wanted to see how it went for my fellows. Hey, isn't there a scene in Beowulf where he holds back for a while, taking Grendel's measure? Yeah, that was me and drugs. Beowulf and Grendel.

October 2 - Tlatelolco massacre: A student demonstration ends in a bloodbath at La Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco, Mexico City, Mexico, 10 days before the inauguration of the 1968 Summer Olympics.

October 2 - Marcel Duchamp, French artist (b. 1887) and great-grandaddy of Dada and Surrealism, dies.

October 11 - Apollo program: NASA launches Apollo 7, the first manned Apollo mission (Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele, Walter Cunningham). Mission goals include the first live television broadcast from orbit and testing the lunar module docking maneuver.

October 11 - In Panama, a military coup d'etat, led by Col. Boris Martinez and Col. Omar Torrijos, overthrows the democratically-elected (but highly controversial) government of President Arnulfo Arias. Within a year, Torrijos will have ousted Martinez and taken charge as de facto Head of Government in Panama.

During my first semester at RPI (and, quite frankly, during most of the rest of my time there), I merrily traveled up and down the Eastern Seaboard in search of adventure, which basically translated into listening to music and/or trying to get laid. I was much more successful in the former endeavor, as I recognized a musical opportunity when I encountered it. By contrast, I was so socially clueless (one ubernurd, far from the mothership) that I basically had to be hit over the head and dragged off to bed by any woman who found me attractive. If I hadn't been good looking, and it hadn't been the 60's, I'd still be a virgin.

I made a couple of trips to Vassar, in the company of my friend, Bullshit Harvey (not his real name), who had a sister going there. The girl who took me home from the dance later decided that I'd been lying about my politics. I can say now that I really didn't know enough about my politics to lie about them, but I believed that I was lying at the time, so she had me there.

The Games of the XIX Olympiad began on October 12, in Mexico City, Mexico. The image that you've all seen from this is the one of Tommie Smith and John Carlos, 2 African-Americans competing in the Olympic 200-meter run, who raised their arms in a black power salute after winning the gold and bronze medals for 1st and 3rd place. By contrast, after winning the gold medal for heavyweight boxing, George Foreman walked around the ring with a tiny American flag, bowing several times to the audience.

But the part I remember is this: Bob Beamon of the USA shattered the world record for the long jump by more than two feet, in a leap of 29 feet 2 & 1/2.

What does it say about the way things were in 1968 that all the counter-culture tropes were abundant at RPI, an old, conservative, engineering school. It said that the times were out of joint. I knew guys who didn't bother to change out of their ROTC uniforms before getting high. Everybody talked the talk, "bummer," "good trip," "Remember kids, don't forget to smash the State!" Even the straightest student quoted Firesign Theater, "Now it's time to play, 'Beat the Reaper!"

The campus political radical guys were seen as amusing, and not nearly as much into the party time as they should be. After all, our student deferments would only take us for four years, and the war was going to last forever. Eat, drink, and try to make Mary.

October 14 - The United States Department of Defense announces that the United States Army and United States Marines will send about 24,000 troops back to Vietnam for involuntary second tours.

I started out at RPI in physics, because I had no idea of what I was doing. Freshman year, the only difference between physics and engineering was that the physics majors took a foreign language (mine was German), while engineering students took mechanical drawing. I'd already had mechanical drawing in high school, though, so I went for the new stuff, rather than go through what I'd already taken (that's part of the "didn't know what I was doing").

In German, however, I quickly hit my standard limitation. I'm very good in languages up to the point of the vocabulary drill. Then I fall behind, because I'm just lazy that way. It probably wouldn't be a problem in an immersion course, but there were none of those around.

So my first test scores were A's but by the end of the semester I was approaching low C territory. No need for further interpretation; I transferred to engineering, and wound up in an experimental course called "Elementary Engineering" taught by Paul Daitch, who would later be my sequence advisor in Engineering Science. EE also had a TA named Gary Steinman, who I later worked with on another experimental course, this time with me as a TA.

November 5 - U.S. presidential election, 1968: Republican challenger Richard M. Nixon defeats Vice President Hubert Humphrey and American Independent Party candidate George C. Wallace. Nixon got 301 electoral votes to Humprey's 191 and Wallace's 46 (Wallace took 5 southern states). The disproportionate electoral split masks the fact that Nixon only got 43.4% of the popular vote, to Humprey's 42.7% (with Wallace taking 13.5%). If the South had still been "solid" for the Democrats, Humprey would have picked up Wallace's 5 states, plus also the surrounding halo of "moderate" southern states, and would have won the election.

I'm sure it would have mattered if Humphrey had won, I just don't know how, or how much. Nixon was an evil bastard of a war criminal, but he hadn't started the war. Neither, of course, had Humphrey. The thought of either of them running the country put us all into frenzied paralysis. It seemed clear that the country's problems ran deeper than merely being a matter of who was President.

By the end of the year, my hair had grown at least to Little Dutch Boy length. That was enough to get me physically threatened by some random working class male at least every couple of weeks.

November 14 - Yale University announces it is going co-educational. We all yawned, as we'd already read The Harrad Experiment, and, having had a couple of months of college behind us, knew that the orgies simply weren't that easy to find.

November 22 - The White Album is released by The Beatles.

December 13 - Brazilian president Artur da Costa e Silva decrees the AI-5 (or the fifth Institutional Act), which lasts until 1978 and marks the beginning of the hard times of Brazilian military dictatorshiop.

December 24 - Apollo Program: U.S. spacecraft Apollo 8 enters orbit around the Moon. Astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William A. Anders become the first humans to see the far side of the Moon and planet Earth as a whole. The crew also reads from Genesis.

Whenever I hear someone talking about the cataclysmic events going on in the world, I think of 1968 (and '69, and '70) and think, "Not yet."

History happens to people, and every person's history is different, both their personal history and their embedding in the larger scheme of things. Every Baby Boomer's story is different, and even a year's difference in birth date can make all the difference in the world. I graduated high school and began college in 1968. That's how it was for me. That's how it was for all of us who had those experiences in 1968. Others had it different. If you think you understand it without having been there, you're wrong. Those of us who were there don't even understand it; we just remember it.

And badly.

1968 Part 1

In the late spring of 1967, I took the SAT exams. This was early; I figured that I could always take them again if my scores were less than what I needed to get into college. All the schools I was applying for had "Institute of Technology" in their names, so the math and science scores were particularly important, and I scored very well on those. I scored even better on the verbal section, but I took that as a given.

By early 1968, based on offered financial aid (I needed a lot of it), and distance from Tennessee (I needed a lot of that, too), I'd settled on attending Rensselear Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York.

On January 5, 1968, Alexander Dubček was elected leader of the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia. His term became known as the "Prague Spring," a time of general loosening of Iron Curtain repression. The thaw officially ended on August 20 when 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops and 5,000 tanks invade Czechoslovakia.

Once I'd received my acceptance to RPI, my time in Donelson became a holding pattern. I made a couple of half-hearted attempts at dating, both girls from the tony Belle Meade district on the west side of town, out past Vanderbuilt University, but my head was not in the game. Or in any game, really. I was so out of there.

On January 30, in Vietnam, the Tet Offensive began, as Viet Cong forces launched a series of surprise attacks across South Vietnam. The Tet Offensive was the "light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train" moment in the Vietnam War, and surprised everyone who'd thought that the war was nearing victory, which is to say, that fraction of the people whom you can fool all of the time. On January 31, Viet Cong soldiers attack the United States Embassy in Saigon. The Tet Offensive does halt until February 24.

On February 1 a Viet Cong officer was executed by Nguyen Ngoc Loan, a South Vietnamese National Police Chief. The event was photographed by Eddie Adams. The photo made headlines around the world, eventually winning the 1969 Pulitzer Prize. Americans are horrified, shocked, simply shocked, that bad things are done during a war.


One of my dates in January would have been to see "The Graduate." I liked it, as it seemed to speak to the disconnected feeling I had about everything, though, truth to tell, I expected to reconnect in college.

My date didn't like it, although she thought that Anne Bancroft was still pretty hot. I don't think she used those words, though.

January 13 - Johnny Cash records "Live at Folsom Prison".

January 22 - Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In debuts on NBC.

On February 4, 1968, Neal Cassady, inspiration for both the Beats and the Hippies died. Later in the year, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe, was released, bringing Cassady yet more hipster celebrity, and I'm sure he appreciated it, really.

On the job as a lifeguard at the Downtown Nashville YMCA, I read, when it was safe, i.e when there was no one in the pool, or maybe a single middle-aged white male swimming laps. At other times I listened to the radio, via single earpiece, when it was safe to do that. When swim classes were in session, of course, the pool got my full attention.

The available music was pretty feeble. Top Forty radio had "Yummy, Yummy, Yummy I've Got Love in My Tummy" on high rotation for weeks. And no matter how much I liked both The Graduate and Simon and Garfunkle, there are only so many times I can listen to "Mrs. Robinson" without thinking of opening a vein. On somebody.

There was a light classical station that I could barely get, plus a couple of "easy listening" stations. I became quite fond of the Baja Marimba Band, and "The Call of the Wild Goose." There was also some instrumental group that did a version of "Everybody Loves My Baby" that was heavy on the kettle drum. Maybe I'll try to find out who did that sometime.

On February 8, a civil rights protest staged at a white-only bowling alley in Orangeburg, South Carolina was broken-up by highway patrolmen, leading to the deaths of 3 college students. Drop in the bucket, really. Or, as some were describing it at the time, "a good start."

There were several versions of "The Best is Yet to Come," on the easy listening rotation, too, including the Sinatra rendition.

On February 8, 1968, the National Socialist White Peoples Party filed suit to obtain a Nazi burial for George Lincoln Rockwell’s remains at any National Cemetery. Rockwell had been assassinated in 1967, and there had been a public standoff sometime later about a previous attempt to bury his body at a National Cemetery, with members of the NSWPP demanding to be allowed to wear their Nazi insignia at the ceremony, and the cemetery officials refusing. This was all orchestrated by one of Rockwell's previous subordinates, Matt Koehl.

I wrote a bit of doggerel about the cemetery incident, using "Old King Cole" as a template. It was, to my recollection, dreadful, but it does have the distinction of being one of the least dreadful bits of poetry I wrote at the time. I was to give up all such attempts at poetry within a few years, and the world is a much better place for it.

On March 12, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson beat antiwar candidate Eugene J. McCarthy in the New Hampshire Democratic primary, but won by only 7 percentage points. Moreover, McCarthy won the lion's share, 20, of New Hampshire's convention delegates.

On March 31, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson announced he would not seek re-election. He'd been on the receiving end of the chant, "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids have you killed today?" for quite a while at that point. I remember thinking at the time, "Holy crap! I think he's quitting because they hurt his feelings." That would not prove to be a problem with his successor.

I was writing a lot at this point, another one of the activities that I used to fill the "empty pool time." My lifeguard duties were still somewhat contained, by attending high school and by the existence of other lifeguards to share the duties. So I was working maybe 3-4 hours 3 or 4 times a week.

One of the things I began about this time was a Tolkienesque fantasy. Much later, after adding a lot more stuff stolen from Jack Vance, Fritz Leiber, and Henry Kuttner, it became Book of Shadows, my first novel. Thank god, I removed the poetry.

On March 18, under heavy pressure from France's ongoing conversion of dollars to gold, the Congress of the United States repealed the requirement for a gold reserve to back U.S. currency. The dollar then began a series of sliding pegs against gold, that is to say, a series of "devaluations." These eventually ceased in 1975, when the gold/dollar link was broken completely, private citizens were again allowed to own gold, and the dollar floated against other world currencies.

I was keenly interested in business and finance, going so far as to have a subscription to Fortune magazine, and reading books on accounting. On the other hand, I was reading books on just about everything.

On March 20, Charles Chaplin Jr., American actor (b. 1925), died.

On March 22, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and seven other students occupied Administrative offices of Nanterre, launching France into a state of revolution in the month of May.

On March 16, the My Lai massacre occurred as American troops kill several hundred (300-500) civilians. The American public did not learn of the event for many months.

On March 14, nerve gas leaked from the U.S. Army Dugway Proving Ground near Skull Valley, Utah and killed a number of sheep.

On March 27, Yuri Gagarin, cosmonaut and the first man in orbit died in a plane crash.

In National Forensic League meets of the period, there were various categories of competition, generally segregated by gender. For most of the categories, such as "Boys' Original", there was a prepared text, which you could deliver until it won a first place prize, and then it had to be retired. Other categories, which had much lower status (and fewer NFL "points" accruing to victories) used someone else's words.

After burning through a few "Original" speeches, my forensic buddy Phil and I got either lazy or more confident, depending upon interpretation. The highest status category was "Extemporaneous" which got a subject handed to you, and you then had (as I recall) fifteen minutes to prepare the speech. Obviously the most you could really get was an outline. But that was enough, really.

It helped that the meet organizers weren't really high in the imagination department; they usually set topics cleaned from recent issues of Time, Newsweek, or U.S. News and World Reports. It was no great trick to locate the relevant newsmagazine, and to pull facts from it. What took some talent was coming up with a speech that didn't sound like you were just reading from a newsmagazine. Also, I needed something to keep me from getting bored with the deal. So I'd be looking for some odd take on the thing. That tended to make me stand out from the crowd, and often the judges appreciated that.

It also gave me an incentive to keep up with the newsmagazines, which was good, because there was plenty of incentive to just numb out from the goings on in the world.

On April 4, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Riots erupt in major American cities for several days afterward. The Asshole who Killed Martin Luthor King was arrested for the murder on June 8th. TAWKMLK first confessed to the crime, then withdrew it, then pled guilty (to avoid the death penalty), and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. He then spent the remainder of his life trying to withdraw his plea and obtain a trial. He also gave interviews that tried to hint at a conspiracy. If you think there was a conspiracy, blame the death penalty for TAWKMLK not getting his trial. I think he was just a lying asshole, myself. TAWKMLK later made a book deal with writer William Bradford Huie (The Death of Private Slovik, The Revolt of Mamie Stover, The Americanization of Emily), which produced a work that I will not name.

Nashville did not have riots, and both the black and white communities patted themselves on the back for it, and even patted each other's backs a bit, which was a good thing.

There was a curfew, however. One of my dates put me up against the curfew when driving home. I don't think I worried much about it. I was more interested in the end-of-the-world sensation produced by driving from West Nashville to East Nashville without seeing a single other vehicle.

On April 6, a shootout between Black Panthers and Oakland police resulted in several arrests and deaths, including 17-year-old Panther Bobby Hutton.

In late April, student protesters at Columbia University in New York City took over administration buildings and shut down the university.

On April 29, the musical Hair officially opened on Broadway. For our sins, we were subjected to "The Age of Aquarius" on the radio for what seemed like months.

In May, student and worker strikes in France, sometimes referred to as the French May, nearly brought down the French government.

On May 17, the Catonsville Nine entered the Selective Service offices in Catonsville, Maryland, took dozens of selective service draft records, and burned them with napalm as a protest against the Vietnam War.

On May 19, Nigerian forces captured Port Harcourt and formed a ring around Biafrans. This contributed to a humanitarian disaster as the surrounded population was already suffering with hunger and starvation.

On May 22, the U.S. nuclear-powered submarine Scorpion sank with 99 men aboard, 400 miles southwest of the Azores.

In early June, 1968, I graduated from Donelson High School, in Donelson, Tennessee.


Pete,

Well, that's 12 years of school gone and we've been together most of them. What's more, there's at least 4 more years coming. Make the most of them. I'd like to think that I know you pretty well – better than most, anyway. Anyway, I know enough so that I can see you've got a great future. Let some more people find out about you – you're great. But then again, no one needed to tell you that.

--Mark

More later.

[Many of the historical events here have been memory refreshed via Wikipedia]