Changes Ahead

We have it within our deepest powers not only to change ourselves
but to change our culture.

— Gary Snyder

Fifty years ago, San Francisco Beat poet Gary Snyder published Four Changes, a hippy-dippy broadside that fast became environmentalism's manifesto.

Who'd ever have guessed fifty years later that not men, but microbes, would trigger the "total transformation" he envisioned.

Snyder conjured a world blessed with a healthy and diverse global population which is governed not by national leaders but a "world tribal council." A world blessed with a "technology of communication, education, and quiet transportation." A world blessed with societies that inhibit power and greed and encourage instead "music, meditation, mathematics, mountaineering, magic, and all other ways of authentic being-in-the-world." And a world where women are "totally free and equal."

Listen to Gary Snyder read his remarkable statement.

Because there's something in the air.

Getting Real

The order of our perceptions shows the goodness of God, but affords no proof of the existence of matter.

— George Berkeley

A new paper published in the science journal Entropy says consciousness underlies the universe.

The paper seeks to unify quantum mechanics and immaterialism.

The paper claims that, in reality, everything—you, your spouse, your kids, your dog, your house, your car, your office, your boss—everything is... pure thought.

The universe "self-actualizes" into existence through an algorithmic rule the authors call the "principle of efficient language." 

Everything, they claim, is a single "grand thought." 

Human beings—as well as animals, houses, cars, offices and bosses—are just "emergent sub-thoughts."

"The Self-Simulation Hypothesis Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics" is the product of a team of scientists led by the Los Angeles-based entrepreneur and cannabidiol-promoter Klee Irwin.

Sound too woo-woo for you?

Well, in the words of Yogi Berra, it's déjà vu all over again.

Eighteenth century philosopher George Berkeley—namesake of the California college-town and woo-woo world headquarters—also maintained that reality is a mental construct.

In his 1710 book A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Berkeley explained how things are actually thoughts, and that the thoughts composing the universe persist through time—even after we're dead—because God is keeping her eye on them.

Berkeley was an Anglican bishop, not an entrepreneur; and he lived in London, not LA.

But, oddly enough, Bishop Berkeley was a promoter—not of CBD but of "tar-water."

Indeed, his best-selling philosophical work, Siris, published in 1744, sought to prove the elixir was a panacea: it could lead you to perfect health and (special bonus offer!) to the contemplation of God.

Here's a handy one-minute guide to Bishop Berkeley.

My Take on the Events Industry

Dear Pollyanna:

So sorry to burst your bubble.

The ride you're on is neither brief nor V-shaped. 

Covid-19 has thrust events into an existential crisis.

Whether the crisis was overdue is beside the point.

Everyone knows this year will be seen disruptive.

But no one knows—once we get control of the virus—whether or when the events industry will rebound, or what shape events will take.

Yes, I agree with you: face-to-face fills a Maslowvian need.

But events will have to be reformulated to succeed post-pandemic. 

Attendees aren't going to revert to old behaviors. 

Your can't, either.

If you're betting otherwise, call me.

I have a bridge to sell you.

Green When Green Wasn't Cool

70

 22

The first Earth Day

How the First Earth Day Was Borne From 1960s Counterculture

On April 22, 1970, a nationwide “teach-in” inspired millions of Americans to care more about the environment.

SARAH PRUITT

I took a lot of kiddin' 'cause I never did fit in

Now look at everybody tryin' to be what I was then

— Kye Fleming & Dennis Morgan

The Jesuits had assigned us Silent Spring three years earlier, but not because they were environmentalists. 

They considered Rachael Carson's book exemplary science writing and thought we'd learn effective argument from it. 

It did make quite an impression.

So when school let out that April day in '71, my friends and I caught the PATH from Grove to 14th Street.

We dashed up the subway steps and filed into the mob. 

A quarter million hippies and wanna-be hippies were romping 5th Avenue, free of traffic by mayoral decree.

It was the giddy "birth of the green movement," as history books record it.

To us it was a massive schoolboy lark.

The spring weather was joyous, the kind of New York City weather celebrated in schmaltzy Broadway tunes. We bought Good Humor bars from a cart and picked our way along the teeming street, stopping to gawk at the painted performance artists, the jerry-built exhibits and impromptu demonstrations.

Most memorable was the rock band we encountered performing on the pavement in front of Madison Square Park. 

The Lower East Side Band was fronted that day by a long-haired Puerto Rican named David Peel, who belted comedy songs about hippies, teeny boppers, reefer and LSD.

We loved them!

Only a year later, Peel and the band would emerge from obscurity when they were discovered in front of another city park by John Lennon, who rushed out The Pope Smokes Dope on Apple Records. 

The album was banned in every Catholic country.

But Earth Day was not. 

And from it arose the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act and the EPA.

Not a bad payoff.

Hyperbole

“Truthful hyperbole" is a contradiction in terms.

— Tony Schwartz

Spartan. Dangerous. Terrifying. Nightmarish. Horrific.

Too often in recent days, I've heard these words used by journalists to characterize the temporary hospitals that are propagating the country.

Spare me.

Valley Forge was spartan. 

Vietnam was dangerous. 

The Blitz was terrifying. 

Aleppo was nightmarish. 

Auschwitz was horrific.

In fact, the temporary hospitals are havens for the sick. 

And the job our military is doing is nothing short of herculean.

There's a hyperbole you don't hear enough.

Hedging

You can fudge. 

You can waffle. 

But if you're really low-life, you hedge.

The verb hedge, meaning to "screen yourself from a bad choice," comes from the Old English noun haga, meaning "fence."

The Brits stole haga from the German word Hegga. The Germans stole Hegga from the Latin word caulae, meaning "sheepfold."

In Merry Old England, hedge came to mean "shelter," because the homeless—highwaymen, knights and vagabonds—would sleep under hedges.

By the 16th century, hedge was used as a verb meaning to "dodge" or "evade." By the 17th century, it began being used to mean to "bet against loss."

Money-lenders in the time would make an unsecured loan to a borrower only were he willing to roll it into an outstanding loan that was secured.

The lending practice was known as hedging.

Of course, gentlemen never hedged.

That may have prompted Samuel Johnson, in his 1755 Dictionary, to say hedge "notes something mean, vile, of the lowest class."

Johnson didn't beat around the bush.

What Is to Be Done?

Last fall—before Covid-19 even had a name—I read historian Maury Klein's 900-page masterpiece A Call to Arms.

Little did I know I was reading the playbook Trump ought to have.

December 7, 1941, hurtled America into war with the Axis.

FDR—a leader who listened—saw in 1939 that to win, the US would have to "bury the Axis in weapons."

(On December 7, the US ranked 28th in the world in the size of its military, which relied on obsolete equipment, weapons and ammunition left from previous conflicts.)

To bury the Axis, FDR undertook what Klein calls "the greatest industrial expansion in modern history.”

But mass mobilization wasn't easy. Union leaders, bureaucrats and businessmen—especially businessmen—pushed back, as did many citizens.

FDR simply pushed harder. 

He guaranteed wary businessmen not only that the government would buy every item manufactured no matter the length of the war, but would assume all the costs of converting the factories back to peacetime production for 10 years thereafter.

The president also enlisted hundreds of "czars" to ride herd on every conceivable raw material, process and product—czars who were experts, not toadies, daughters and sons-in-law.

Within only months, FDR built America's colossal "arsenal of democracy," using brains and brawn—not blustery bullshit.

And America rapidly buried the Axis.

Blame the Left

If you do something bad, never, ever blame yourself.

— Donald Trump

The president's all about blame.

But who's to blame for him?

The left.

The late American philosopher Richard Rorty made that clear in his 1998 book Achieving Our Country.

In the first six decades of the 20th century, according to Rorty, the left tackled big issues like income redistribution and civil rights (think of the New Deal and the Great Society).

But in the latter decades—disillusioned by the Vietnam War—the left got sidetracked. It was led to champion only niggling issues like reparations and cross-dressers' rights (think of Anti-Columbus Day and the Transgender Legal Defense Fund).

Rorty predicted that tragic digression would lead to Trump's election.

American workers would see that government doesn't give a hoot about jobs and wages, Rorty wrote, and "decide that the system has failed and start looking for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots."

And there you have it: America has elected a demagogue to distract itself from its misery.

We have only ourselves to blame.

NOTE: To learn more about Richard Rorty, listen to this podcast.

Lambs to the Slaughter

I hate victims who respect their executioners.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Across America this weekend, fundamentalist clergymen are calling congregants to worship, despite the alarms sounded by scientists, while, inside the White House, pro-business advisors are calling the nation to "reopen" immediately.

Why do followers put credence in such advice?

Do they all harbor a death wish?

Three Cheers for Mom and Pop

Notice the pattern?

Most small businesses—those lucky enough to be deemed "essential"—are innovating.

Most big businesses, on the other hand, are shuttering for the pandemic; so, too, are most mid-size ones.

Employees of "mom and pop" companies are working; employees of large and mid-size companies are filing for unemployment.

We're seeing incarnate which business leaders value employees and customers over shareholders.

And we're seeing which leaders know how to pivot, and which merely talk about pivoting when it suits them.

Three cheers for mom and pop!

These are Days

In late July 1606—part way through a season that would soon premiere King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra—William Shakespeare was ordered by London's Privy Council to shut down his theater. 

The plague was in town.

The Privy Council was worried that audiences would be “pestered together in small romes" where "infeccion with the plague may rise and growe, to the great hynderaunce of the common wealth of this citty.”

Rather than lay off the troupe, Shakespeare urged his actors to flee hot-spot London for a tour of the provinces, where they could strut the stage while staying safe from the dreadful disease.

But country villages were sleepy places; and many of the days and weeks the actors spent in them were spent idly.

Shakespeare, however, chose to capitalize on the downtime, using it to write three new plays, as recounted by historian James Shapiro in The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606.

Thanks to the plague, 1606 was a very good year for the bard. 

Indeed, no other of his remaining life would be as fruitful a year.

And how about you?

What are you doing with your time?

These are days you'll remember. 

When May is rushing over you with desire
To be part of the miracles you see in every hour.

You'll know it's true that you are blessed and lucky. 

It's true that you are touched by something
That will grow and bloom in you.

— Natalie Merchant

5 Lessons I've Learned from “The Walking Dead”

For five seasons—until I began to turn zombie-like myself—The Walking Dead captured my inner teen’s imagination.

Little did I know the show’s many lessons would come in handy.

Five stand out from the crowd:

Wear gloves and a mask when outdoors. A bandoleer or an ammo belt can look quite stylish, too.

Keep your social distance. Particularly when passersby issue guttural sounds.

Gas up your vehicle. You’ll need it to escape. Besides, gas is under two bucks right now.

Don’t follow leaders. Especially those who’ve turned orange—the first sign they’re zombies!

No matter what, carry on. As the hero Rick Grimes said, “We won’t get weak. That’s not in us anymore. We’ll make it work.”

NOTE: If you or someone near is suffering right now, please forgive my stab at gallows humor. Stay well! And fear the walking dead.

Newark in the Grip

Before Salk's wondrous vaccine reached American schoolkids in the early 1960s, my parents worried about polio. 

A lot.

In the summers, it was everywhere.

Historian Richard Rhodes describes it thus:

"Polio was a plague. One day you had a headache and an hour later you were paralyzed. Parents waited fearfully every summer to see if it would strike. One case turned up and then another. The count began to climb. The city closed the swimming pools and we all stayed home, cooped indoors, shunning other children. Summer seemed like winter then."

The late Philip Roth vivified those days in his brief, heartbreaking 2010 novel Nemesis, winner of the Man Booker International Prize.

It's July 1944. Polio is raging. A playground director, Bucky Cantor, faces a dilemma: should he quit his job and flee for the safety of a kids' summer camp in the Poconos, or should he tough it out in "equatorial" Newark? 

In his inimitable way, Roth shows how an earnest boy comes to grips with history and loses out.

Nemesis is a book about an epidemic; and also about youth, family, decency, religion, sex, love, hope, death, despair and destiny.

In 2010, Roth told NPR host Terry Gross the book began as he brainstormed ideas for a topic:

"I began, as I sometimes do with a book, jotting down on a yellow legal pad all of the historical events that I've lived through that I've not dealt with in fiction. When I came to polio, it was a great revelation to me. I never thought of it before as a subject. And then I remembered how frightening it was and how deadly it was and I thought, 'OK, try to write a book about polio.'"

It's Roth's final novel. And one of his finest.