The Butterfly Effect

On 28 June, 1969, the love of my life was a green Volvo 144. I had a beautiful and smart wife, but she was a beard. I consciously thought of the Volvo, following Marshall McLuhan, as my Mechanical Bride. I mean, what was more macho than having a car and being one's own mechanic? Surely having greasy fingernails meant that I was straight, right? (Perhaps I should have gone for a muscle car, but, whatever.) I was enrolled in a physics class at Memphis State University which somehow I had never quite gotten around to taking in order to finish my BA in history from Roosevelt University. Then, I was going to teach in an inner city Memphis public school as an alternative to going to Vietnam.  i had tried for a conscientious objector's status, but my draft board wouldn't allow it unless I claimed a religion. I could have played the Methodist card--my beautiful and smart wife and i had been married in a Methodist ceremony, and the chairman of the draft board, also a Methodist, suggested it. But I refused. The chairman of the draft board was also the mother of my brother's fiance, and she suggested the inner-city teaching gig. Killing kids slowly with day imprisonment rather than dropping napalm on them. It seemed better.

If I read or watched the news then, it was probably about what was going on in Vietnam. Beautiful and smart wife and I had a television then. I remember another young man who was almost my first lover--we had been roommates, and we slept together and cuddled and wrestled and washed each others' backs but never did anything genital came over to watch the Moon landing in July. But I didn't see any news that June on either the television or the newspaper about queers fighting back against a routine police raid of a bar in New York, 2,334 miles away, even though that was much closer than the 238,900 miles that separated me from the Moon.

Indeed it would be nearly twenty years later before the ripples of the 'riots' at the Stonewall Inn would become strong enough to rock my boat and give me the courage to 'come out'. By that time my beard included two children, two golden retrievers, a mini van and a station wagon, and a large Tudor style house.

I have been thinking about my ignorance of the Stonewall Inn in 1969 as I have looked at the 'news' today.  We only went to the Moon for about three years. and the repercussions of those trips have probably been more about how we see the Earth than in furthering space travel. The repercussions of the Stonewall Riots have been, in my life and in the lives of many of my friends, transformational. The idea that I would not need to hide my self behind a wife and greasy fingernails has led to far more than genital sex with some very beautiful men, as enjoyable as that has been. Once I realized how seldom things are as they have been presented, a whole new possibility of exploration has opened.

You may have noticed that I used the term 'queer' for the people who fought back at Stonewall, rather than the more politically correct LGBT+ that most of the stories I have read on this anniversary of the riots have used. That is because I think most of us are in some way queer, that most of us have some traits, traits that are often very valuable gifts, even if we happen to be cisgendered straight folk.  So, I say, come out come out whoever you are. You never know when you might be the butterfly who will open a whole new world for some kid who grew up in a backwards small town in mid nowhere, as I did.

Big Media, Data Leaks, and Government Spying in the Good Old Days

By late 1966, there were 385,000 American soldiers on the ground in Vietnam, with another 60,000 sailors stationed offshore. More than 6,000 Americans had been killed that year, and another 30,000 wounded. I was a naive sophomore at Memphis State University. I was there rather than at one of the many 'better' schools which had offered me scholarships because I kinda felt I wasn't really ready for prime time, and Memphis State wasn't quite prime time. The summer before I had been nominated by one of my professors to attend a big National Student Association summer seminar, first in Louisville with the other southern kids, then in Madison, where I was assigned the task of writing a paper about the influence of automation and computers on the job opportunities of minorities. I and the rest of the kids who were told we were there because of our brilliance, and we got to meet some of the rock stars of left-leaning political and artsy=fartsy sorts: Saul Alinski, Davis Campbell, and Julian Bond among others. (I had a serious crush on Bond.) Hubert Humphrey gave us a rousing address at the end of the event in Madison.  Later I would learn that I had been chosen because I had subscribed to Ramparts Magazine, and that rather than being funded by the Field Foundation, as had been claimed, the whole shindig was an agent provocateur operation run by the CIA.

But in the fall of 1966, I wondered why my luggage had been searched on the train from Louisville to Madison, but didn't expect it had been done by my government. I was still romantic and clueless. I still thought that Kennedy had been a 'good' president, and that congressmen thought about the decisions they made with some care and wisdom. (Having Bill Fulbright as my Senator probably skewed my perception. I considered E. C. Gathings to be bad guy in a regular sort of way, but I never wondered what it was he 'Took', and the farmers liked him, it seemed, and my grandmother liked his wife. (I don't know if it was the wife who posed naked for magazines on bear skin rugs.)  So, when there began to be protests against the war in Vietnam, and the Commercial Appeal published an editorial boasting how much wiser Memphians were than the citizens of Cleveland, I did what any romantic young clueless kid who had been told he was brilliant would do: I wrote a letter to the editor.

In my letter to the editor the Memphis Commercial Appeal--'A Beacon of Light to Serve the Mid-South'--I did not criticize the Vietnam War. I suggested rather than perhaps Memphians might not  be wise to ignore it, that it was likely to become a really big deal, and that perhaps they should do a bit of research about it--not so easy then, more than thirty years before Google--and that, most importantly, they might consider writing to their congressmen to see what they thought about the growing US involvement in Vietnam. I signed it with my Memphis State address.

Wowsers! The Commercial Appeal published my letter in the Sunday edition. I had achieved the big time. The glitch was that they published it with my parents' address. My parents started getting angry phone calls. The idea that one should write to one's congressman about something more trivial than the farm allotments and subsidies!

I decided to become a big time activist, since I was already getting the flack. I organized a 'write-in march'. I put posters up around town suggesting that people might write to their congressmen about the US involvement in Vietnam, and that we might gather at Union and East Parkway and walk to the downtown post office to mail our letters. I even wrote a press release, which I duly took to the local TV stations. Two of them just had in-boxes, but the Scripts-Howard station--the Beacon of Light guys--had a receptionist who took my paper and asked me what it was. I said it was a news release. I was told that nothing was news unless they decided it was news.  A few days later about twenty stalwart US citizens gathered to walk to the post office. Many more people, it seemed, were interested in furtively photographing us, and occasionally throwing rotten eggs at us. I know, a cliche, but true.

We mailed our letters. I and a few friends had lunch at Britlings--I always got the cod and the vanilla pudding, and went home for the next day in the life. On the next day in the life, two men in cheap hats parked their brown Chevrolet Biscayne with small hubcaps outside my apartment and just about never left. My telephone began to make strange noises.  The Commercial Appeal published another editorial about the Vietnam War, calling us rebels who had written letters to congress a 'small group of nobodies'. Although my room mate and I had never been late for our rent, we were told that our lease could not be renewed. Memphis State wrote me to say that they could not re-admit me the following year, even though I was a National Merit Scholar with a gradepoint of about 3.8, but they would find my transcript if I wanted to transfer.

There are a lot of other embellishments I could add to this story, including how Frank Zappa's Susie Creamcheese was the daughter of the Memphis police chief, who bragged to her that he has put one of her friends under the jail, which was how we found out what had happened to him and therefore could get him out, but this little amusement is already longer than the 15 seconds one is allotted in the 21st. century. But I was reminded of it when I was appalled by yesterday's photograph of Mark Zuckerberg and Emmanuel Macron sucking (zucking?) up to each other yesterday. They wore better suits than the guys in the cheap Chevrolet, but they jogged my memories of the good old days when the data leaks and spying and abuse were less well known.

I am, I suppose, still romantic and naive. I expect better of us. But we ain't changed much. What has changed is that the truth is not only out there, but not so hard to find if we are willing to look for it. Jesus is reported to have said, 'know the truth, and the truth shall make you free'.  But we seem to value border walls or 'free health care' over freedom.

We Are all Collaborators

I read tthe story that accompanied the photo, about Zuckerberg's turning over to the French goverment  information about folks who  post 'hate speech' on Facebook, and I was ready to ditch Facebook. Thern I began to think about what other actions I might take that would be commensure with that one.  Itseemed that I had two choices. I could become a hermit in a cave somewhere, with as little econnection as possible with the sinful world, spending my days confessing my sins and singing psalms, or watching birds and sunrises. Or, I could engage as much as possible with the world and try to understand it and its inhabitants.

At different times in my life, I have pretty much made both choices. The advantage of the hermetic option is its simplicity, it's completeness. Hermeticism  is pretty much a kind of monadism, complete unto itself. It aspires to be a pearl, a pure gem. Monks of course like to claim that their austerities and prayers benefit the whole world in some ways and there are enough people convinced of that to keep them in contributions or to buy their over-priced but holy fruit cakes and liquors. But I have noticed that taxes are never collected in thoughts and prayers.

The advantage of engagement is that it is dynamic. There is something new evry minute,  It is a fabric of many colours, not a pearl. There are always new materials to consider, new threads that may make the frabric stronger or that may make it tear. The difficulty in choosing materials is that very few of them have all the properties one might desire. One thread might be very strong but rather ugly. One might be beautiful but weak. It's hard to know what threads to include.

Of course there monastic communities that try to incorporate a variety of gifts into their community, but they get to choose their members. The body politic is more difficult. There are almost always some members, some threads in the political fabric, whom other members would rather exclude. A society that starts pure, like the early settlers of New England, the Puritans, have children who don't seem quite so pure as might be expected. A half-way covenant is needed. Or there are some groups whom a majority of a democracy deem completely unacceptable. A concentration camp is needed.

Few human inventions are more fragile than political power, so the powerful are fearful. They collaborate with one another to try to preserve the unpreservable. And those of us who would hold ourselves unstained from the world like to think we can avoid collaboration..  So, I look at the photograph of Zuckerberg and Macron and think that I will leave Facebook. Ha. Who am I in the parable of the wheat and the tares?  I think that I had beter remain engaged lest I find myself thrown into the furnace.