No Country for Old Men

 Whenever I am in the mood for regrets, which is seldom, because I recognize it is for the most part of fruitless mood, I regret that in 1966 I moved to Chicago rather than to New York.  I had been accepted by the New School, but somehow I decided against it.  (I sometimes wonder if that decision extended my life, because had I moved to the Village in 1966, I might have been caught up in the AIDS crisis.)  I went instead to Roosevelt University in Chicago, where I had some very good teachers, met some wonderful people, and fed myself as often as not with the little sandwiches at the Members' Tea each afternoon at the Art Institute.  

What I most regret about that decision, however, is that I missed an opportunity to have known, perhaps, Nam June Paik,  Ironically, I dabbled around the edges of some of the things he was doing in New York while I was at Roosevelt, but I never met anyone else who was at all interested in such dabblings.  What also happened while I was in Chicago was the beginning of what Zorba the Greek called 'the full catastrophe'.  Marriage, family, golden retrievers, mini vans.  It would take me more than twenty years to escape  Then no longer a young man, I nevertheless went West, to Santa Fe.  I took Super Highway 40 to Clines Corner where there is a cut-off to Santa Fe, to a world unimaginably different from Memphis or Chicago or New York.

Santa Fe and the surrounding hills and gullies are about as artsy-fartsy as one could hope for, and again I met some wonderful people. I fed myself with the mountain air and hosted my own teas ,on Sunday afternoons, or  brunches on Sunday mornings.  I even indulged in a bit of artsy-fartsyness myself,and was able to make enough money to wander around a bit.  If I had good sense, I might be writing this in a cafe in Santa Fe--if there is a cafe open in Santa Fe during the Great Fear--instead of in a tin can on the edge of nowhere.  But I have never had good sense, so I wandered back to Arkansas, to Fayettevile and the University of Arkansas.  It was an odd move.  When I lived in Memphis and told people I wanted to move to Santa Fe, their response was almost always 'Oh.  I want to move to Santa Fe.  How can you move to Santa Fe?'  I would answer, 'Go west on Interstate 40 and turn right at Clines Corner'.  When I told people in Santa Fe that i wanted to move to Fayetteville, they would almost always respond, 'Oh.  I want to move to Fayetteville.  How can you move to Fayettevillle?' I would answer, 'Go east on Insterstate 40 and turn north at Fort Smith.'  My move to Fayetteville had a few more detours than that, but I got there eventually, and I found the Purple Chair.

The Chair is Eero Saarinen's Womb Chair.  Yes, that Eero Saarinen, who also designed the TWA Terminal at what was once Idlewild, now JFK, airport in New York.  It sits in the northeast corner of the Fine Arts Library in the Ed Stone's famous Fine Arts Building at the University of Arkansas.  Yes, that Ed Stone, of the MOMA in New York.  In fact the Fine Arts Building has a courtyard that rather replicates the Paley Garden at MOMA.

So, as a no longer even middle-aged man, I could sit in that chair and feel connected to the lost opportunities of my wasted youth.  That chair is right by the stacks holding the books about Korean art, and in my old age I became at least a bit acquainted with the missing piece of the artsy-fartsy understanding of the world I had been seeking a bit in Chicago and Santa Fe.  If I had good sense, I would might be writing this essay in a coffee shop in Fayetteville--if there are any coffee shops open in Fayetteville during the Great Fear. (The coffee shops in Fayetteville are so good that when I got back here to the edge of nowhere, where coffee is a major god, there being no other gods left, people asked if I had gone to Onyx.  When I said I often had breakfast there, they wanted to touch the hem of my garment.)

But I don't have good sense, and besides, the summers in Fayetteville are hot enough to make one want to move to hell for relief, so I came back to the edge of nowhere.  Here I make do with a chair that's an Eames  kock-off. (It's actually more comfortable for long periods than the Womb, which like all wombs, is a little cramped for old men.)

And I just have a little pile of Nam June Paik books. (Although some of them are not in the UofA Fine Arts Library.)

I'm hoping to add to the pile in the future (if I live so long):

Why, you might be wondering, am I sharing too much information with the world.  I am sharing it because a friend back in Arkansas posted today on Facebook about 'having a hard time understanding how our currently frustrating and unhealthy political and cultural state has come about'.  I thought, as I always do, because we have become, as McLuhan predicted, retribalized, and it is, as Toffler described, shocking beyond our ability to adjust.  (Is it any wonder that Zombies walk among us, at least in our popular art?  And didn't McLuhan tell us that if we wanted to understand the future, we should look at art?) But there is another reason I have been revisiting my past about which regrets are fruitless.  It is because I enjoy revisiting hope. (You know, that thing that springs eternal in the human breast, because the human breast is a slow learner.  Or maybe it just has Patience and Fortitude, to borrow an image from another library of my past.)

In 1966, I was a young man full of  hope.  Hope that I could understand the world.  Hope that my generation would get it right.  (Generational hubris is a thing.)  The International Style in architecture still held out an idea that we could build in ways that transcended our tribal differences.  (Even though the nations among which that style was inter- were mostly found in northern Europe.)

And in my past, or present, no one has held up hope more clearly than Nam June Paik, whose life occupied all the great warring powers of the modern world.  His Korean  family took refuge in Japan to escape the Chinese.  He then made his way to Germany. and then to the United States.  He hoped that the tools of the modern world would allow all of us to enjoy personal sovereignty but with cooperation. Nowhere perhaps is this better shown than in Good Morning, Mr. Orwell.

That is a hope which I am not yet willing to abandon.  The human breast may be a slow learner, but it is a learner.  Although the scale of modern warfare seems horrible to us, and it is, a smaller percentage of young warriors die in combat,  even in the 'world wars' of industrialized nations, than died in the combat of  the idealized tribes of the our past

As an old man I recognize, admittedly with some regret, that 'An aged man is but a paltry thing/A tattered coat upon a stick'.   And yet I hope.  I take a sort of wry solace in the reaction to Nam June Paik's first major exhibit, one which he enjoyed remembering in his old age. It was at a small private gallery in Wuppertal, much less glamorous than, say, his installation at the Guggenheim.  He exhibited works that would predict most of what he would do later, works that were quite revolutionary in 1963, but which were almost entirely unmentioned in the mainstream media.  What caught the attention of the media was that Joseph Beuys took an axe to a piano in the entrance to the exhibit, and that Paik hung an ox head over the door of the gallery.

Hanging an ox head over the door was a tradition, it seems, in feasts in Paik's homeland.  It was all many contemporary visitors to the show saw.  Now a Google search of Nam June Paik Wuppertall Oxhead brings up no photo of it at all.  

As McLuhan reminded us, we travel into the future looking into the rear view mirror.  Even Nam June Paik couldn't resist hanging an ox head over the door of what would be a very futuristic exhibit.  I hope I live long enough to see what comes when we emerge from the Great Fear.  I am certain it will be much more interesting, much more hopeful, than what is in the rear view mirror.

Political Science? I Don't Think So.

 Lately I have heard a lot of people supporting, often demanding, political actions based on 'the science'.  Ah, if there only were such a thing as 'the science'.  Consider, if you will, the men in these two photos:

Which of them was a scientist?  Well, actually they both were.  (In addition, they both were pipe smokers, a habit I adopted for a while during my college years, thinking it would make me look wiser. )  I'm guessing many more of you dear readers will recognize Albert Einstein than Niels Bohr, but both men's work is critical to our understanding of the universe and how it works.  Both developed theories that could be rigorously tested by predictive experiments and also by something vital to the scientific method, experiments that would disprove them. The outcome is that both men's theories have been proven correct.  The problem is that so far their theories haven't learned to play well together.  More scientists will have to do more work before we begin to understand the stickier bits, and even then it would be premature to say that there is 'the science'.  Rather, there are folks using the scientific method to try to understand the world.

Physics has pretty well established itself as a useful scientific discipline, with demonstrable advantages in our everyday lives.  Such achievements made some other academicians jealous.  How could they receive the recognition and respect given to the sciences?  Well, they would start being sciences, too.  The social studies became Social Sciences.  The venerable philosophical tradition of Politics was in many schools replaced with Political Science.

I had the privilege of taking two courses in political science.  The first was as I guess a sophomore at Memphis State University.  The woman teaching it gave the most boring lectures I think I ever heard, but when the first test arrived, I quickly learned that her multiple choice questions telegraphed the answers, so I started only going to class when there was an exam.  I got an A in the course.  I learned a lot from that experience, but none of it had anything to do with politics.  The second was as a junior at Roosevelt University.  Ah, the exciting sixties.  My professor was Stokley's personal attorney.  (No one would have  been so gauche as to say Stokeley Carmichael, although I had never met the man.)  My professor had I think a law degree, not one in politics, but were radical unpackers, not scholars.  I got a C in the course, not because of  to my work, but because I was white.  All the white kids got C's.  All the black kids got A's.  It was to teach us about white privilege.  None of us unpacked the oddity that most of my black friends got A's in their classes with white teachers. (I had mostly smart friends.)  I learned a lot from that experience, but none of it had anything to do with politics.

All the above is a long-winded introduction to why I am hoping to be less dogmatic in voicing my expectations for the next four years of what will pass for politics in the United States.  When I finally got around to taking a physics class in college, we did little experiments with measurable data, calculated what we expected would happen, and compared the results to test our hypotheses.  A small but real use of the scientific method.

In 2016 I was a sophomore all over again.  I accepted as data about the incoming regime the statements of my friends who watch CNN and get the paper edition of the New York Times.  They were nice people.  Why would they mislead me?  And they 'liked' it if I made some remark about Trump that reinforced our  fore-gone conclusions about him.

Certainly that post from my 1 February 2017 Facebook page is an example.  And, it was pretty correct from my viewpoint.  Besides being rude and non-presidential, he had torn down Bonwit's Art Deco Facade, put a really ugly building right where Michigan Boulevard crosses the Chicago River, and had terrible taste in drapers.  But,  hey man, here's the thing:  when I, to continue my sophomore metaphor, when I listened to the lectures, so to speak, he hadn't done so bad.  If politics were a science, the data would have proved that the theories about Trump were wrong. I was wrong.

Now, in 2020, I would suggest that Joe Biden and perhaps even more so, Kamala Harris, have done everything they could to prove they are unfit to be president.  I certainly understand why people might not think Trump has been ‘presidential’, but the democrats have failed t, in my opinion, to provide desirable alternatives either.

I am going to try to hold judgment based on the ‘data’ available now.  (although  there is a lot more record of Biden the politician than there was of Trump.)  I am expecting nothing good from the new regime, but I am going to wait for results before I conclude that my theory is correct.  

However, that will not keep me from having a bit of fun with the Harris-Biden circus.  It seems that the party , whoever they really are, have chosen Mr. Potatohead as Big Brother.  I expect that Jack Dorsey will continue to exercise his role as Minister of Truth.  Perhaps Kamala Harris will be Minister of Plenty,  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez  the Minister of Love, and Andre Maginot Minister of Peace. (If dead men can vote, they can certainly serve as Minister Heads.)

Fear not. (It may take a while.)

I have never actually counted the instances myself, but it is said that there are 366 occurrences of the admonition to 'fear not' or its equivalence in the Christian Bible.  I have often shared that bit of legendary biblical scholarship, and from time to time in my life I have actually followed that advice.  Whenever I have, my life has improved and I have felt good about myself. But, far too often, I have cowered hidden in the crowd. There's not need to be brave or honest if one is not seen.

Sometimes I suspect that there are worthwhile reasons to be unseen.  One of the saddest memories I have of being a father was when I overheard my son telling my daughter. 'never let them know you're smart'. School is pretty much a gauntlet at best, and that happened when they were going to Memphis public schools.  What was I thinking?  

Having feared being known as a homosexual, I had married, and then divorced, something which is I suspect is always hard on children.  It was certainly hard on my children. Giving into fear has collateral damage.  But then I 'came out', and I felt good about being honest.   I did not want to have extra-marital affairs.  I didn't even want a divorce. I just wanted to be honest. But there is often a bias against honesty if it keeps up appearances. My wife did not want to allow that honest, so, we divorced.

However, as important as sexuality is, as essential as trying to understand one's own sexuality is, sexuality is not something uniquely or even particularly human.  What does differentiate humans from goldfish, among other things and perhaps most importantly, is our intellectuality. (Is a word?  I think its meaning is at least clear.)  And coming out intellectually can often be much more difficult than coming out sexually.

Like most folks, I kinda like to have friends, and as I have wandered through life, I have drifted into lots of different groups of people.  It's easy either to agree or at least not disagree with them.  Folks have a lot of crazy ideas, and to call those ideas crazy makes friendship difficult.  A lot of crazy ideas aren't worth the effort to even question.  

And yet.  A lot of not just crazy but harmful ideas become so widespread as to be hardly noticeable unless one disagrees with them.  I have two degrees in history, one from a private university and one from a state university, and (surprise!) both schools were almost entirely Marxist.  Most of my professors could have transferred to the University of Moscow with no changes in their lecture notes. I can remember four exceptions. One was a philosophy professor at Memphis State. One was my advisor at Roosevelt University, who was data-driven in a time when data was much harder to find than it is now. The other two were in my graduate studies at Arkansas State. One was just an all-around skeptic from the University of Colorado, and one was perhaps the most helpful teacher I ever had after high school, with a degree from Claremont, who taught politics.  I flunked one of my graduate essays.  Why?  I wrote my answer from a classical, Aristotelian viewpoint, thinking it would be read by the guy from Colorado.  It was read by a Marxist, and I had posited the outrageous idea that some men (and women, although the actors in the question were men) could act from their concepts of virtue rather than from economic determinism.  What did I do?  Well, I took that question over, writing it in the politically correct vein.  It was a sort of 1984 moment, when I said something I knew was not true, but I did it and didn't even notice.  Thus one looses one's integrity.

Lately, most of my friends are very left-leaning democrats, who seem most often to think that the highest human value is 'free' health care.  They read the New York Times and find Donald Trump disgraceful. Now, full disclosure, I find Donald Trump outrageous.  I also find Bernie Sanders outrageous, and Hilary Clinton demeaning of her 'followers' for whom she wants to be a 'champion'.  What feminist allows for champions these days?  So, in the 2016 election, I voted for Gary Johnson, but I also swallowed the blue pill.  

I remained in the matrix of fear that the New York Times and CNN and the Washington Post and my democrat friends concocted about the dangers of Donald Trump.  He was going to put kids in cages. (Never mind that Saint Obomber's administration had built the cages.) He was going to destroy gay rights. (Never mind that  one of his Supreme Court nominees supported the decision to extend the Civil Rights Bill's protection to gay people.)  I looked at the news each morning to see where there was a new war.  (Never mind that President Trump has consistently been the least war-making president in recent history.) In other words, I let the little fears spread by the sort of intellectually mushy folks who had been my teachers continue to influence my thinking, because it was easy.  I could post something on Facebook critical of 'the fucking moron' and it would get lots of likes. I was on the side of the angels.  I was on the side of the smart people.  What was it that Hilary Clinton had called Trump supporters?  A basket of deplorables?

For three and a half years those angelic folks the non-deplorables,  milked a false narrative that somehow Trump was a Russian agent, that he was a racist.  Meanwhile, Russia hasn't moved back into Poland,the economy has boomed, and unemployment rates for non-white folks fell to the lowest levels in decades.  I kept waking up to find that the things the democrats would tell me would be the end of the world as we know it if Trump were elected, hadn't happened.  

Now the fear machine is being cranked up again, and I am told that I must be mentally ill because I didn't vote for a demented old man who will almost certainly be manipulated if not replaced by one of the meanest women ever to  enter US politics.  I was told just days ago by one of my 'liberal' friends that I had gone around the bend because I that police should protect private property rights.  I put 'liberal' in quotes because property rights  have long since been abandoned by many main stream leftists.

And now that the folks who spent the past four years calling half the country every sort of nasty name Twitter would allow, and that was just about anything so long as the person being attacked seemed conservative, those folks are calling for unity.  One of my 'friends' posted this on Facebook a few days ago:

Except that the population of Poland was down to about 24 million after World War Two, it could have been one of the propaganda posters used by the Soviets as they improved Eastern Europe after their victory.

Now,, I must confess to being a slow learner.  Or perhaps, more importantly, I should confess to being someone who allows himself to ignore empirical facts when doing so makes life more pleasant on a daily basis with others who are ignoring empirical facts.  It's easy to yield to the fear that one's friends will think one queer if one disagrees with the beauty of the emperor's new clothes. Besides, there is the wonderfully convenient crisis of the corona virus, a virus so deadly one may never know one is infected unless one is tested.  Imagine, all those cases walking around thinking they are healthy when they could be a statistic to frighten us all on the nightly news.  Obviously the only thing to do is to close down the economy and rebuild it better.

In my last blog post, I explained how as someone who leans towards being a libertarian, even an anarchist, I found Trump a much less dire choice for president than Harris/Biden.  Now as someone who has long advocated a post-national view of the world, I want to explain why I don't think Klaus Schwab's view of that world is one I want to support.  The post-national world is possible because , with the emergence of what Marshall McLuhan called the Electric Age and what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called the noosphere, communication between people unmediated by states is possible on a scale unimaginable before.  But despite the vision of one my favourite artists, Nam June Paik, that that world might be different from what Orwell had envisioned, there are certainly many folks who have grasped the Orwellian possibilities of being mediators. 

If personal freedom is to survive in Airstrip One, and there is no guarantee that it will, we must first conquer our own fear of being taken to Room 101, because if one deviates at all from the Truth as the Ministry describes it this afternoon, someone will take you to Room 101.  (I wonder if Orwell chose that number because it so often designates the first course in the official story as it is taught in colleges?)  I have long found it ironic that in many ways the world of Twitter was foretold by Jesus:  'whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the housetops.'  And as Nietzsche foretold, we have found ourselves stuck in the cycles of Christian theology with no way out.  We have inherited the concepts of guilt, sin and shame,but without the means of redemption (thanks to Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds, p. 211).  Once one makes one step away from RightThink, one is doomed to the outer darkness.

I have found it particularly interesting that one of my friends who has cast me into the outer darkness is someone with whom I became friends on Facebook and later in meatlife because he thought I was 'authentic'.  I think he means that I have not tried to present someone whom I am not.  (Indeed, one of the things that made Facebook attractive for me before absolutely power had corrupted absolutely, or nearly so, was Zuckerberg's ideal of 'one identity'.)  As always, Shakespeare had it right in Polonius' advice to his doomed son.  I want to be true to my own self, but it can seem dangerous.  But as Winston would learn in Room 101, to do otherwise is to lose oneself.

Or, again, as Jesus said: 'What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?'