Boy Scientists

Those are common daisies.  Not everyone knows that.

I was a smart kid.  A very smart kid   I had a chemistry set.  It was really, I mean, I could make smoke and bubbles, it was big.  A really good chemistry set. Big.  Not everyone had a chemistry set, but I did.  I had a microscope, too.  It made little things look big, but I was a smart kid, and I knew they were still little.  There are a lot of little things, but there are some big ones, too.  My chemistry set was a big one.

My half-uncle Frank had a chemistry set, too, but his wasn't as big.  It was a really good chemistry set, really good, but it just wasn't as big as mine.  Not everyone knows what a half-uncle is, but I had one.  He was a really good half-uncle. He grew up and made a lot of money, so I guess he was pretty smart, too.  But I was older.  I was born first.

So we grew up in the fifties.  Those were hard times.  There were Russians.  Now I love Russians.  Some of them are really great people.  Really good people.  Some of them have a lot of power.  But those were  hard times.  Lots of dangers.  There were atoms.  And communisms.  Atoms are really small.  Not everyone knows that, cause, you know, sometimes atoms are strong.  There are powerful atoms.  If they were smart, they'd make a bunch of money.  I'm being sarcastic, but my half-uncle Frank made a bunch of money, He was a really good person.

So we had goals, Frank and I.  It's good to have goals.  Some kids, they don't have any goals, and they end up in jail.  Sad.  I've known folks like that.  Some of them are great folks, but, sad, they end up in jail.  Frank and I had goals.  We were gonna keep the russians and their atums out of the United States.  It's a great country, the United States, and we didn't want Russians to come in if they were gonna bring their atoms and communism.  Some russians are very good cooks, though.  In my home town there were some Poles.  They were very good cooks.  Great pickles.  Really good pickles.  And sandwiches  The Poles had come to run away from the Russians and their communism.  And the atoms.  Zeke didn't put any adams in his coffee. He and Verla were good people.  Maybe not all Poles are good people.  Some Poles aren't even people.  Newspapers have poles and they're not people.  Newspaper poles are fake news.  Lies. Frank wasn't a Pole.  He was my half-uncle.

Frank and I had chemistry sets.  We were gonna keep out the Rushuns.  So on Saturdays sometimes we worked in our lab and didn't go to the movies.  There were really good movies then.  A lot of them were based on the Bible.  I never did see the one about the two Corinthians.  We didn't have any bars in my hometown, but we had good pickles.  Good watermelons, too.  The best watermelons came from Lake City.  My grandfather helped build the bridge at Lake City.  He dropped his hammer in the river.  It was the St. Francis River.  It was a really good river.  Well, sometimes it flooded.  Floods can make a big mess.  Really big messes.  Not as big as the messes the Mississippi River made.  It made the biggest messes.  Really huge messes.  So Frank and I were gonna keep out the Russions so they couldn't have any of our mess.  Cause the messes grew good cotton.  Who knew?

Frank and I we needed bombs.  To use against the russians.  We made all kinds of great weapons, the best, weapons, to throw at the Russians when they came.  But we needed something to blow them up with.  So we put common daisies in fruit jars.  Mason Jars, mostly.  Not everyone has Mason Jars any more.  Great State, Iowa.  Mason City.  I also played trumpet in a band.  I was a great trumpet player, but I was the best scientist.  America would be great again if we still had Mason jars.  When we put the flowers in mason jars with water and left them out in the sun--kids could play in the sun then, we took off our shirts and got freckles.   I had a lot of freckles.  The jars got bubbles, and sometimes they exploded.  We--my half-uncle Frank and I were also making a rocket to explore space, so we liked those explosions.  We wanted really big explosions so we could blow up Russians and send our rockets to the Moon.  We also planned a trip to Mars.  Really big trips.  We planned the best trips.

Then I got a fly rod.  It was a great fly rod.  It came from Japan.  It was made out uv bamboo.  The Japanese used to be bad people, but the United States, a great country, used atoms on Japan.  Our atoms made Japan good, and they made good fly rods.  I went fishing on Saturdays.  Lots of fish.  Big fish.  Boeing,  great company boeing.  Kinda like boing boing.  Boing made great big planes to keep out the Russians, so Frank and I could go fishing on Saturdays.  I had a bamboo fly rod.  It was made in Japan.  Frank had a glass rod.  It was made in Wisconsin.  Great state Wisconsin.  I went there one summer, but I didn't take my fly rod.

So, I'm not a scientist any more.  But I remember those Mason jars with daisies in them, and they got filled up with bubbles.  And I think it might be great to use those daisies against the Virus.  They'd be easy to enjest.  You could mix a little honey in with 'em two, I guess.  Great workers those bees.  So, I'm not a scientist.  I'd love to spend several saturdays in the lab, but it's an emergency.  And I have a really good feeling about those daisies.

The more things change . . . .

Ah, yes: ‘Give light. and the people will find their own way’

In 1965 I was a young and optimistic kid of 19 summers, a sophomore at Memphis State University. The war in Vietnam was not yet called a war, but I suspected it might be worth noticing. So, in my optimism, I tried to convince people to write to their congressmen asking how they, their elected representatives, expected how US policy might evolve. Radical, huh? I made some fliers suggesting we might gather at Union and East Parkway and walk to the main post office on Front Street to post our. letters (I made no suggestion that one should support or oppose the war.) This being the dark ages before Twitter or Facebook, I had to pay for the fliers and put them up by hand around town. I took copies of them to the local newspapers, and to  radio and TV stations. I remember well the reception I received from the receptionist at the local Scripps-Howard group when I said, innocently but patriotically,  ‘Here’s a news release.’ She looked at me dismissively and said, ‘It’s news if we say it’s news.’

My release did not make it to Channel 5 news, nor to the pages of the Commercial Appeal or Press Scimitar. But, as our little group of about twenty people walked past the beige brick building on Union that was home to those august enlighteners of the way of the people, we picked up an escort of two or three men in cheap brown suits who alternately took a our photographs and threw eggs at us.. That evening there was a brown Chevrolet with small hubcaps parked below my apartment windows, with either two of the photo-eggers or their clones. Scripts-Howard had reported us.

I was reminded of this incident this week when I was invited to join a Fast from Facebook for the month of May, and when folks started complaining that Facebook is not publishing invites to Corona lockdown protests, but is passing the information on to state governments.

Now that I am a bit older than 19, and neither innocent nor patriotic, no longer expecting people to find their own way and certainly not looking to newspapers or Facebook for light and on the path, I am at least a bit amused. And I haven’t thought about consulting ‘my elected representatives’ since Bill Fulbright retired. I’m not sure, however, if I would look to the Fulbright family newspapers for enlightenment.

The Black Swan in the Land of the Unicorn

I have, as I have entered my 'golden years', tended to become more and more optimistic about the possibilities for the future of the human race.  I don't think people are necessarily good or even wise, but we are clever.  Looking at the long tendency of human history, I acknowledge that our existence has hardly occupied a micro-moment of universal history, but we have crafted many clever inventions to aid our ability to feed and clothe and shelter ourselves. I am not someone who expects everything to turn out all right.  When people say to me things like, 'See you next Thursday', I most often respond 'Unless I or you die or the volcano goes off'.  Shit happens.  The possibility of a better future is not a guarantee that there will even be a future.

And yet, we have experienced a period of unparalleled advances in human technologies to make that future better.  Again and again, I have tried to look at those advances through the lenses of the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Alvin Toffler, and Marshall McLuhan.  That is, I see the changes as being part of the evolution of the earth, as being highly stressful to us earthlings, and as changing us in ways that are mostly unavoidable but which we seldom really recognize or understand.  So, smaller transistors allow our minds to become interconnected with each other and with machines in ways which worry us but which we use more and more because somehow we just can't unplug.

Once again, unicorns--new companies valued at more than a billion dollars-- have roamed our world.  As consciousness has spread, even tribal folk who need no clothes and little in the way of shelter find themselves as part of the larger world and sell their products anywhere there's electricity.

The potentials I, a perhaps foolishly optimistic old man, have seen have not been without opposition.  Vide Trumpist populism or radical Islamism.  But I have expected, barring the volcano's going off, that the folks of the world would adjust to their new environment after a bumpy few years, and emerge in a new and also disruptive and environment equally hard to understand but with fewer people starving.

But, the volcano seems to have gone off.  The black swan has come and it has gone viral in a few months.

I must confess  that I am writing this essay not because I have an clever plan that cannot fail to help us cope with the falling skies.  Rather, I am writing it to help me think through it for myself, to try to think of the right questions to ask.

It helps to dismiss the wrong questions, the first of which is 'why?', whether compounded as 'why now?' or 'why here?' or 'why me?'.  The answer to that question is, in crude terms, 'shit happens', and in more elegant terms, 'the laws of thermodynamics'.  Einstein may not have wanted God to play dice with the universe, but so far as we can tell, the universe is basically a dice game.

Because I am an optimistic old man, I tend to ask, 'what happens after?'  I mean, it's pretty obvious that a lot of people will die, and that we are unprepared, and that our political 'leaders' aren't half so smart as they told us they were, and that it's gonna be harder for poor countries than for rich countries  But if we indeed do survive until next Thursday, after the ash has settled, what will it look like?

I had been expecting a world in which most nations would become less and less important.  China with its Roads and Belts would probably remain a major player, but Europe is becoming more and more a theme park and the United States seems at least under its current administration or the opposition party to be drawing more and more into isolationism.  The 'Global South' is a whole other big dice game, but even Brazil now makes airplanes.

I had been expecting a world in which trans-national corporations would  supplant most of the national services.  Remember Eisenhower's Interstate Highway System.  Now we are getting Musk's Hyperloop.  How long can it before Google's Nest security system would have facial recognition and a stun ray so we won't have to call the police, whom few of us like much anyway?

I had been expecting a world in which we might recognize that your eating a slice of  pie does not need to mean that I must skip desert.

But it does seem that your having a face mask does mean that I must face Voldemort bare-faced.  In southern Italy the trans-national corporations are already supplanting the government: they are  organized crime syndicates. 

Predicting the future is in itself a sort of hopeful activity.  As the Second World War was winding down with a lot more needless destruction than necessary, because we are fools, England started planning for the Brave New World ahead, and set up the Brabizon Committee to assure that Britain would have global leadership in post-world air travel.  They built a number of airplanes to try to sell to the world to assure that role, and to provide air service to the British Empire in British aircraft. One of them was the largest aircraft yet built, the Bristol Brabizon, named for Lord John Theodore Cuthbert Moore-Brabizon.  It was longer than Lord Brabizon's name.  It was HUGE.

No one bought it.  Imperial Airways had become part of BOAC before the war, and soon BOAC would be known as Boeing Only Airways Corporation.  When was the last time you flew in a British airplane?  When was the last time you toured the empire? Now British Airways, having been winnowed out of BOAC and British European Airways, Cambrian Airways, and Northeast Airlines in 1974, seems likely to become more chaff of the virus, another bit of corn eaten by the black swan.

So.  It's a rather cool early spring afternoon, one on which I might choose to go to the beach and read another chapter of After Shock and look forward to the next fifty years.  Instead I am sitting in a tin can, far socially distanced from the world, listening to minimalist music from catastrophic movies, wondering if there will be a next Thursday.  But although  it may just be part of my old foolishness, I ponder the wonder that I have actually lived to experience a big black swan, and I look outside my window from time to time so as not to miss any unicorn that wanders out of the forest. 

If you've read this far, and have any expectations past next Thursday, after the ash has settled, I would be delighted if you shared them in the comments.