A Story for All Times

Science fiction is like country music.  There's the real thing, like Johnny Cash, the Stanleys, the Carters or Merle Haggard and Willie; then there is what mega-sells, the plastic neo-Nashville hat acts (three chords and a cliche, as I refer to that dreck).  Classic SF is anchored in the real, and the author has something authentic to say that would be as true set hundreds of years in the past as hundreds in the future.
For all the cheap production values and deliciously hammy acting (fun to enjoy in itself), Star Trek was and is a worthy successor to H.G. Wells, Jules Verne and Arthur C. Clarke; without the props and sets, it told us stories that improve with age.  Stories that we want to go back to and find deeper meaning.
Episode #76, aired 2/28/69, "The Cloud Minders," is so relevant today it is startling. 
The Enterprise arrives at planet Ardana to obtain a mineral, Zenite, much needed on another planet to halt a crisis.  Kirk and Spock beam down to the Zenite mines to negotiate, somehow not knowing what Ardana's deal is.  The miners are acting violently, but the security forces of the leaders who dwell in the floating cloud city above disperse them and invite our intrepid Star Fleet emissaries to meet with them while order is restored and the mineral can be gathered. 
They observe that Ardana society is divided between the laboring Troglytes in the mines and the elite in the luxurious city above.  Turns out that the mines were in the midst of a rebellion, and Kirk and Spock get involved with Troglyte infiltrators who have managed to enter the city.  Dr. McCoy, meanwhile, has discovered that the Zenite emits an odorless gas which degrades the Trogs' mental capacity and plays havoc with their emotions.
The infiltrators, free of the effects of the gas for the first time, begin the realize the full extent of their mistreatment.  After several tussles and reversals, the rebels accept the filtering masks the Enterprise crew has devised, and clearheaded, with Kirk as ally, demand equal treatment.  The Enterprise departs with its mineral shipment; a good week's work done.
You can see the disorienting gas as advertising/broadcast propaganda/sickening pollution; the cloud-dwelling elite as the globalized 1% in control of commodities, production, and labor; even the infiltrators as the OWS and the Arab Spring.
When that 1% go too far with unaccountable authoritarian capitalism and the always-bad decision making of centralized control, they won't collapse and go away.  They are already using their billions in cash, which they understand will be devalued by inflation and eventually worthless, to buy agricultural land and establish safe havens (look back to a previous post, "Mystery Ranch," for a description of Dubya Bush's well-prepared, off-grid Crawford TX retreat).  One hedge fund group is already the 15th biggest farmer in the U.S.  A former hedger, with millions to spend, is buying large tracts of farmland in eastern Sudan and western Ethiopia (good soils, Nile river water, dirt cheap labor).  They are as good as the best SF writer at looking into the future.  Better, actually.
As has been the case in feudal societies and for a while in South America, the superrich are building up secure gated compounds, with high walls and security guards (thousands of soldiers will be coming home, to what other employment?).  Greenwich, CT and Cali, Columbia: the same scenario.  Many mansions now have large Cummins generators and plenty of diesel fuel to power all the conveniences their owners are accustomed to and do not intend to lose.  Several years ago I knew, in contented little Elizabethtown PA, a local baron (fortune and land from his father's trucking company serving Hershey Foods) with many acres and a garage-size building housing a generator, backed up by a pair of fuel tanks behind a fence.  There were two repair shops loaded with tools and parts, and you can bet on less visible alarm systems, guns and ammunition.
The elite in Beijing, China, are now insulating themselves from the killing air pollution by installing advanced air filtration systems in their buildings and homes.
The cloud city imagined on Star Trek  -- it's not fiction.
       
   


  
 

News to Me

For the past three days, the newspaper has been 80% about the scandal-du-jour, this one at Penn State; before that it was the bankrupt capital city, of course.  Before that, miscreant weather.  Seemingly serious stuff, but exciting and diverting, too.  The smaller filler entries are always taxes, crime and fires.  A lot of people would agree with old Will Rogers ("All I know is what I read in the papers..."), but would have to update that with the addition of other, noisier and trashier media (tabloids, AM radio, overexcited cable right-wing propoganda).
If we had any to start with, this constant assault displaces any sense of  proportion between what's entertaining and what trends and events will actually be important to our lives.  Do the yeast cells in the wine vat, living it up consuming the delicious sugar in the grapes, notice that it will all soon be gone and they will die in the alcohol wastes?  We think we're the crown of creation, each one of us a sacred personhood, but it looks as though we're a lot more like those mindless yeast cells.
The hares in the snowy north multiply, like every species, as much as they can, taking more than full advantage of all shelter and food resources.  The foxes follow suit, and their population collapse soon follows that of the hares, who in their numbers ate everything.  My point is that the only news worthy of 80% of the paper is this:  7 billion people on the same earth.  William Catton noted way back in 1981 that the resource-depleting indistrial age which allowed such astronomical population growth was not proof of the inevitable march of progress, but came about due to two non-repeatable achievements:  the discovery of a second hemisphere, and development of ways to exploit the planet's fossil fuels.
"Use of oil has quadrupled earth's carrying capacity since 1900." (Paul Chefurka, 2007)  The normal carrying capacity of non-industrialized earth is about 1 billion; a sevenfold increase in humans obviously overshoots the fourfold increase in capacity.  Memo to the foxes:  the huge supply of hares (oil, arable land and usable water) is temporary.  You can conserve and limit your numbers or just live it up today.
We foxes don't want to hear it.  "As President Carter discovered, it is not easy to take a country conditioned to believe that every problem has a technical solution and to persuade its citizens that a major change of orientation has become necessary."  (Stewart Udall)
We are amused at the cargo cult beliefs of the Melanesian islanders during World War II, who saw the advanced Westerners in their midst get every good thing from the sky. And how do our deepest beliefs differ? We in the United States virulently rejected the few Cassandras who saw beyond today (Carter, Dr. Hubbert, the 1952 Paley Commission, Udall and those damn granola-crunchy commie tree-hugger environmentalists) and bought the "Morning in America" meme that since we're exceptional, resources are either inexhaustable or technological substitutes can always be found.  G.E. will just bring good things to life (Ronnie R. was paid to say that; he was well-paid by Big Oil and Big Medicine, too). Well, technical superiority failed in Vietnam, the oil embargo coinciding with the 1970 peak in domestic oil production was not noted for the huge economic-political impacts it had and will have, the atomic age was overestimated, and we don't notice the stark reality that 95% of the world's fossil energy has been discovered and everything in the developed world moves by or is made of it.
There was no mention in the print or broadcast media of what was discussed at the ASPO (Association for the Study of Peak Oil) conference in Washington last week; boring stuff, I guess.  There was a little room left for the dozens of paragraphs about awards, local politics and crime that padded out the full-pages coverage of the latest scandal.  As long as we keep things in perspective...




 

The Coffeemaker on The Wonder Years

"...In many households, Green Stamps were the primary source of disposable family income...my mother saved Green Stamps like my college education depended on them.  She took comfort in knowing that, as long as my father could buy food, there was a better than average chance that Santa Claus would find our house come Christmastime.  She gazed longingly at drab photographs of TV-dinner trays, basketball hoops, vacuum cleaners, pressure cookers, wall clocks, and camping equipment as if she were looking at film stars in a movie magazine.  All because of the little green stamps, a wonderful selection of shoddy merchandise was sometimes attainable in a life otherwise devoid of entitlement...Were I to meet whoever invented these stamps, I would pledge them eternal gratitude for offering my mother hope in times of despair."
                                              -- from Rodney Crowell's autobiography, Chinaberry Sidewalks

The S&H album pictured above was the style in use when my grandmother methodically collected those stamps, mostly from the local Weis grocery store chain.  Gas stations were the other main source, but the free drink glasses offered in the summer were better premiums; in times of fierce competition, you could score both at one purchase and feel like you'd really won.
When I was visiting in Pennsylvania in the summer, I'd get to install the miniature stamps in the albums (using a small sponge instead of a quickly gummed-up tongue) while perusing the catalog for whatever weapon or outdoor gear item called out to my greedy young heart.  Fifty points completed a page; 1200 an album.  The large stamps were 50 each rather than one or 10; getting one seemed like a lottery win, if I had known what that was.  And it took a looong time to fill that album.  Patience is in shorter supply when you're young than time is; like the similar long stretch to Christmas, it made the long-sought moment of acquisition as sweet as anticipated.
How many kitchens, thanks to Green Stamps, had a three-piece set of red and white plastic containers labeled Flour, Sugar and Tea from the catalog (seductively named The Idea Book)? And more than a few clocks, Faberware pans, and (oh yes!) those TV dinner trays -- what home didn't have those?  Ours (in Richmond) came from Best Products, which was no step up in class from trading stamps, believe me.  My grandmother was quite pleased with the large, square electric fry pan that cost many filled books, and used it often for years.  If I'd gotten that bow and arrow set, the impertinent groundhog raiding the back of the garden would have been in for a rude surprise.  Or a good woodchuck chuckle, more likely, as I would have missed and taken out corn stalks rather than clever rodents.
The heyday of the stamps was from the 1930s through the 1980s.  In the 60s, the catalog was the largest publication in the United States.  S&H was sold to a company who tried to modernize them as points for online purchases, but that may have faded away by now.  But comparing the two, I'd say stamps were a much better and more satisfying deal than frequent flyer points today.
And the coffeemaker the mother liked so much on The Wonder Years?  From S&H.  She felt like a winner.
   

Off the Road

From the Dead's AOXOMOXOA, taken at Olompali

Jack Casady, Jerry Garcia and Mickey Hart playing at Olompali in 1968



Rancho Olompali State Park

I have a feeling that despite spending two weeks around the central coast of California recently, we did not get to nearly enough of it.  The tone was relaxed and the main goal was pretty much just to explore the Napa Valley, which was just fine.  Not knowing our way around very well, we picked a few things to concentrate on rather than spending large amounts of time lost on the highways (although the signage was good, and with a GPS we could have done all right -- without a good map or electronic help, I could not, however, find a shopping center a mile away in compact Carmel). 
The trip down Route 1 from Napa to Carmel was a delight.  We passed by many towns I had heard of and I was fascinated to see how they varied:  some dry and flat, some hidden in wrinkled, green hills, some hugging the San Pablo Bay shoreline, some intensely agricultural, some rich, some forlorn, their industries and military facilities long abandoned.  Legendary poets of the 40s - 70s had lived all around:  Snyder, Whalen, Ginsberg, Lamantia, Kyger; musicians like Suzanne Ciani, Mimi Farina, the Bay area bands, ol' David Freiberg and so many others. The parade of over a dozen Ferraris that zipped by was a nice surprise -- confirming the belief that anything can happen in the Golden State, and does most every day.
The day trip to San Fran couldn't have been better:  a rare balmy sunny day, a  peaceful and uncrowded ferry ride from and back to Vallejo, introduction to the famed Blue Dog coffee stand in the terminal upon arrival, the vast farmer's market, an excellent Italian bistro (across the street from where John Phillips and his associates were once the house band), and finally up to the Coit Tower and down the famed Filbert steps, where Tales of the City was set.
We did go through the western neighborhoods of San Fran from the Presidio through Golden Gate Park, outer Sunset and outer Richmond, which we'd never been near before, and stopped in so-funky Santa Cruz for some creative food and atmosphere.  What to do?  There are years' worth of places to explore just in the SF peninsula, but I looked back to the north-of-the-bay counties like Marin, thinking we'd missed too much even though we'd gotten around more than on previous trips.
Although it's mostly memories now, and peaceful, not looking much like its notorious past, I'd really like to go back and visit Olompali, which I'd first found out about in a couple of old books about the Grateful Dead.  While searching around to find out the who, where and when of this oddly-named place (it's Miwok for "southern village"), I realized that a novel I'd read by T.C. Boyle, Drop City, a Lord of the Flies-like take on a mid-sixties commune set somewhere in Marin, was pretty much the factual story of what occurred at Rancho Olompali just after the Dead, the Jefferson Airplane and Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters were there in 1966.  The title is actually the name of another, longer-lasting artistic commune in southern Colorado (their story is related in a book by founder Peter Rabbit, but is hard to find).
The Acid Tests put on by the Pranksters, with music by the Dead, were getting a little too much scrutiny in the city, so they all headed northward and spent some summer months at the old mansion and on its grounds, playing away and freely using still-legal LSD. Janis Joplin, tight with Pigpen for a while, added her own considerable color.
The Rancho was a white stucco mansion built in 1911 by the grandson of a dentist who became wealthy by inventing dental powder.  The dentist in the late 1800s treated his mother-in-law who died while under anesthesia, driving his father-in-law, James Black, to drink and an accidental death.  The first home there was an adobe (still extant) built in the 1830s by a Miwok headman named Camilo Ynito.  He was conned out of his land and home by the illiterate, clever but ill-fated James Black for $5200.  The gold coins were hidden; Camilo may have been murdered for them and it's said they were found, with a metal detector, under the floorboards of the unhappy house after it burned in 1977 (faulty wiring or malcontent ghosts?).  The property passed from the family in 1943 when it was bought by the University of San Francisco for use as a retreat, but it was mostly either empty or leased out for the next 34 years until it became a state park.
From November 1967 to August 1969, a commune called The Chosen Family was set up by former businessman Donald McCoy who leased the Rancho and went through hundreds of thousands of his family's dollars supporting it.  It was no model for an intentional community, as McCoy's only principle was doing whatever came to mind, which was mostly large quantities of drugs.  About a dozen children were there, and according to those who remember that time, they were actually the most responsible and turned out well -- except for two unfortunates, very young girls who fell into the unfenced pool while riding their tricycles.  CPR was bungled; cars wouldn't start, and they did not survive.  Two drug raids had scattered the founders, the money was gone, and the deaths deflated what energy was left.  County officials and armed sherrifs moved in, cited code violations, and ordered everyone off.  The pool is filled in now, just a grim ring of grass.
On top of all this strange history, the Bear Flag Revolt staged its first battle in California with the Mexican authorities in 1846 at Olompali.  I doubt if they could have imagined an Acid Test there 120 years later.


     

Snowtober

That strange Halloween music you hear is...chainsaws.
Everyone (except you Californians!) has had one bad storm after another lately, but surely the people just starting on recovery from the floods just could not believe the biggest October snow in 100 years was on its way.  Early Saturday morning we heard the rain and thought, with relief, that the temperatures would stay up and we'd just get more water we surely do not need.  Then, suddenly, a thick cloud of cottonballs appeared in the air, another unwanted gift from a sorely ticked-off Mother Nature. 
The leaves had barely started turning and were still thick on the trees, and the snow was wet and heavy -- a deadly one-two knockout blow that took out, either partially or fully, almost every deciduous tree on our increasingly bare hill.  And today that wet blanket is mostly gone but the damage will remain for the next twenty years.
Three-quarters of a big well-formed maple on a steep hillside is on the ground.  The only two ways in or out were blocked by over a dozen collapsed Bradford pear trees which have been chewed up by by one wind- or rainstorm for several years now.  Our electricity was out for twelve hours, which was not bad compared to the 20,000 in the county to the south who are still juiceless.  Most of the trees will surely just be cut down as what remains does not look like much any more.  I doubt if anything will be replanted, since they were put in by the long-gone developer, and the Landscape Committee of the Homeowners "Association" likes to cut and chop but only plants small things which soon die out.  Silver maples and Bradford pears are commonly used in suburban landscapes, and are about the worst choices there are.
Jim Cantore of the Weather Channel was here, adding to the national scrutiny of our misfortunes (weather) and dumbassedness (city bankruptcy).  One poor man was killed while napping in his recliner when a large tree crunched into his house.  And they're keeping an eye on a farm silo, which is leaning into Route 11 and looks like it has a very short future indeed.
It's always something.


 

My Favorite Conservative Lesbian Feminist

I used hyperlinking without knowing it was a thing, and before computers.
My method developed rather quickly as a reaction to required reading in high school.  Not the excellent lists Columbia or Harvard students are required to complete in the summer before they commence college, which if followed would have you half-educated already by September.  No, what propelled me to find a way through to what genius, insight and inspiration was out there beyond my suburban-desert horizon was the demand, still puzzling to me, that we spend a half-year on Great Expectations.
Not to say we can do without Dickens.  His minor works are delightful but you only need to read one of the magnum opi, and that one should be about any character other than Pip.
The school bookstore had one of those vertical spin-around carousels to display paperbacks, and it actually had some good ones that had passed under the notice of the curriculum police.  Score.  A year or so later, I found Sandy's bookstore on Grace Street in the Fan, and I was on my (own literary) way.
I took advantage of the authors' knowledge of and fondness for books of all types, not prescribed ones: contemporary, earlier 20th century, foreign, and just odd, and searched out those that sounded intriguing.  I was off to the races.
Before out-of-print or rare books were so easy to find on the internet, the search itself was both challenging and frustrating.  Norman Douglas' novel from the 20s, South Wind, was on my radar for over 20 years before I found it, in perfect condition, free on the local library give-away table.  I almost said "my precious," but fortunately not out loud.
John Fowles, the British novelist whom most of us discovered after seeing the film version of The Collector, is as fine a guide to all things historical and literary as you could wish for.  He mentioned how taken he was with a 1913 novel by a Frenchman who tragically died a month after he joined the army at the outset of World War I.  Without the internet, I don't think I'd have every found a copy of Le Grand Meaulnes, and without Mr. Fowles would never have known of it.
Wallace Stegner's Beyond the 100th Meridian was mentioned by one of the many writers who held him in high esteem, and I'm still grateful for the tip, because it's now in my all-time top ten.
Today, on the blog Dispatches From the Culture Wars (on freethoughtblogs.com), I was introduced to someone I'd never heard of who is one type of writer I treasure:  the cranky misanthrope.  They're usually an older male, of the H.L. Mencken variety...but the 75-year-old Florence King is unique -- a Southern lady, a traditional conservative (the kind with a brain), a lesbian, feminist and monarchist.  Lately, however, she just prefers "spinster."  Isn't that someone you'd like to share a mint julep with (until she smacked you over the head with her cane)?
A descendant of colonial Virginia notables, the irony of her own lower-middle-class situation growing up must have bemused her as her mother and grandmother endeavored to raise her as a lady and a snob.  And she followed a conventional path as college student, teacher and newspaper features writer until she just couldn't stay on the tracks anymore.  Late in life came essays, novels, autobiography and even erotica and a romance (the less ladylike stuff under pseudonyms).  For many years, Ms. King has written a column for the National Review, of all things, where she has laboriously "shovelled through mountains of bullshit." Andy Rooney is just the Reader's Digest version of this spitfire.
Take the time to read the blog post mentioned above.  It quotes a series of letters between Ms. King and her agent, the subject of which is John Updike, and it's a skewering to remember.  She's got a sharp eye and a sharper tongue, and you could fill a deliciously mean book with morsels like these:
"Writers who have nothing to say always strain for metaphors to say it in."  (Touche, Mr. Updike!)
"Time has lost all meaning in that nightmare alley of the western world known as the American mind."
Link by link, you always find something or somebody you don't know how you lived without.








  

 

  

Stuck in the Traffic Circle of Life

There's no end to the cliches about making choices or decisions in life.  With relative wealth and mobility, we think more in those terms than believing we're just in the thrall of fate.  Whatever our will or desires, we are limited by the fact that we fall somewhere in the continuum between those masters who are prepared and are in the right place and time, and those in the lower ranks or in traditional societies who have few options and just struggle day by day.
We are individualistic to an unusual degree, and forget that family and class determine most everything elsewhere, as in Italy, India, and much of South America and Africa.  There, you're fortunate to move into a family business or landholding because jobs are scarce and connections determine everything.  We're a nation of existentialists, though; we 'Muricans think we determine our own futures through education, vigorous effort and ambition, within a strangely contradictory straitjacket of conformity.  Some find a way.
Very much like cooking a fine meal, it's a combination of timing, preparation, proper equipment, ingredients and learning from experience.  But you're not a gourmet chef.  What if you felt you had no adults you could really trust, no choices other than getting a steady job were discussed, and you weren't sure you understood the goals anyway?
Naive and uninformed:  I remember thinking when young, from the lessons of television's Sergeant Friday, the Lone Ranger and Hopalong Cassidy, that crime was always punished.  Then you find out that half of murders go unsolved, and probably 10% of those prosecuted and convicted are innocent.  You'd be surprised how many of our and the Silent Generation got their ideas of history from John Wayne and the Old Testament.  In the course of re-educating yourself you wonder how anyone could have made good and productive choices while operating on a basis of misinformation and myth.  And yet, for those who just believe in the Mighty Oz, things can work out pretty well. 
Not only is that shaky mental and social ground you're standing on while trying to make decisions, but since Freud's theories have been so successfully used in political and corporate propaganda over the past century, your unrational side is, every waking hour, being relentlessly manipulated.  No wonder most working class people stop learning and growing around 18, and the more educated do the same around 30.
You might decide to make a big change to see what falls out because things are really going nowhere where you are.  In retrospect, that's just desperation; faint hopes for fortuitous change are like falling backwards into a swimming pool before checking to see if it's filled.  After a few of those, you become very, very careful about making choices, knowing all the while that no one ever found anything by setting the limits so close.