Who Is that Masked Man?

It is I, a fat old man living at the edge of nowhere in a tin can I call Deck 15.  I started wearing a mask when I go out into the world as soon as it became apparent from from  events in  England or China that the Covid-19 virus could be a serious health threat.  I didn't remove it  when Democratic 'leaders' like Nancy Pelosi and Bill de Blasio told me to go to Chinese New Year celebrations, that there was no danger, because I don't follow the advice of political hacks.  I didn’t  remove it when the fucking moron occupying the White House, whom even fewer and fewer Republicans are calling a leader, told me there was no danger, that everything would go away like a miracle by some date that has long passed, because I don't follow the advice of fucking morons.  

Rather I follow the advice of medical folks who know as much about the current pandemic as anyone, and who have been consistent in their insistence that the virus is a serious thing even if we don't know everything there is to know about it.  I prefer the advice of people who base their statements on facts rather than their feelings.

I continue to avoid large crowds.  I find it a basic insanity that a good way to express one's value of human life, black or otherwise, is to endanger the lives of a lot of people so one can signal one's virtues.  Besides, I don't have much virtue to signal.  I'm just a curious old man who always knew that something like the virus and /or complete political chaos could happen and seriously increase the chances that we would manage to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory just as we as a species were finally reaching a level of prosperity to feed and cloth and house most of the people in the world. I was delighted to have lived unto a time when  the obstacles to our doing that were our political hardheadedness rather than economic scarcity.  If I should catch the virus and die, the world would hardly be less well off for it, but I'm curious.  I'm curious if we as a species can manage to come out on the other side of this catastrophe and continue to further our progress in the science and technology that allows us to make real, meaningful change, or if we will sink into another dark age.

I have tried not to panic.  I have gone to my favourite coffee shop as often as I can climb out of bed before they close.  (During the pandemic, they are closing at 12:30.). I have gone to the grocery store with its hand-washing stands and arrows on the floor.  I have bought pizza, untouched by human hands, several times a week, and I have continued to buy drinks at a little shop that's as close as the edge of nowhere has to a bodega.  So far we have been spared much of the effects of the virus here at the edge of nowhere, but that could change as tourist season opens up.

Still, I will continue to wear my mask when I go out, and I will avoid crowds, because I want to be able to indulge my curiosity, and because I hope that you, the people whom I am trying to avoid infecting, will live long, prosper, and do great things.  My mask is not any kind of political statement.  I am not ashamed of it.  I would be ashamed if I did not take responsibility for my own health. I would be ashamed if I based my actions on the statements of political leaders who can't even balance a budget rather than on the facts  as best they are known.  I like to think that masked man is at least a bit prudent.

Chaos Theory vs the Great American Experiment

Fortunately, I don't know anyone who thinks that the killing of George Floyd was a good and justified act.  Unfortunately, I know several people who think that the looting of businesses in Soho was a good and justified act. They justify their opinion by claiming that the United States has systemic racism.  (They don't quite manage to explain how destroying people's livelihoods will end systemic racism.)

I want to explain why I think those people are wrong, and argue that racism is actually counter to the American system, which is unusual in the history of the world in trying to promote racial justice.  But I also want to examine the very real forces that are weakening that system and which could bring much less protection for the 'inalienable rights' that Jefferson talked about in the Declaration of Independence, not only for black people but for all Americans.

What would become one of the most remarkable nations in the world, offering what millions of people from all over the world a hope for a better life, had two sorts of founding.  The first was an uprising that can perhaps be called a sort of power-to-the-people movement.  The hooliganism of the Boston Tea Party, which we tend to forget was an attempt to avoid paying a tax that was imposed specifically because the colonies had promised to pay the expense of the Crown's army during the French and Indian war, got an idealistic cover letter of sorts from the Virginian Thomas Jefferson, whom we tend most often these days not to mention without adding that he was a slave-owner.  Well, of course he was a slave owner.  It was the eighteenth century, and folks weren't woke yet.  But he was waking up, and his Declaration of Independence outlined the ideas that led to the much more egalitarian society we have today.  That uprising of the people would probably not have succeeded, and the English army would like have just burned Jefferson's plantation and his writings, except for the brilliant leadership of George Washington.

After the revolution, however, there were still the dishes to wash. It would be Washington, in support of a better form of government to replace the colonies' first Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, who used a phrase which has remained one of the most important ways of understanding what the United States would become.  He would be the first president in the government that was established by our present Constitution, and he wrote in 1790 that 'The establishment of our new Government seemed to be the last great experiment for promoting human happiness.' One might do well to re-read the Preamble to the Constitution from time to time.  The establishment of what we have come to know as The United States of America was a recognition that the power of government ultimately rested in the people, an idea quite in keeping with the ideas of Jefferson, but, with a bit of help from folks like James Madison, it also recognized that people tend to get crazy sometimes and throw stuff that doesn't belong to them into the sea while they are dressed up like someone else.  In other words, a system needed to be established to protect us people from ourselves.

It's a system. It's not a utopia.

But it was a system that expected free men  could and would work together to achieve the goals of the Preamble.  These days it is again and again the existence of slavery that is held against the founders.  Interestingly enough, Jefferson in his first draft of the Preamble had condemned slavery.  (Yeah, I know.  He was a slaveholder.  He was kinda like those folks who condemn big corporations on Facebook using their iPhone.  Sometimes we find ourselves in sticky situations.). But slavery and slave trade were expected to be outlawed, so much so that slave trade was  forbidden to be outlawed until 1808, when it was.

Nor was it racist.  The famous 'other persons' who were counted as three-fifths of a person for representation in the House of Representatives could be white or black or others--yes, there were white slaves, but they proved to be less profitable than black slaves because they tended to contract malaria more easily.  Free black men were counted just the same as free white men, and only three states, Virginia, Georgia, and South Carolina, restricted suffrage to whites.  Race and color would only appear in the Constitution with the Fifteenth Amendment. For a more in-depth view of the issue, one might click here.

I felt it necessary to write about slavery in the Constitution and in the early days of the Great American Experiment because once again people are in the streets, claiming to be the heirs of the Boston Tea Party or the heirs of slaves, demanding change that would often be extra-constitutional, outside the system (Ironically enough, a rapidly growing number of black Americans are recent immigrants from Africa. The American system may not be perfect but it's the one people want to join.) It would not be so dangerous if it were only the power-to-the-people sorts who are revolting against the system.  Indeed it would be useful for a wise leaders to listen to the power-to-the-people sorts as a sort of feed-back on how the system's doing.  I'm sure Lao-Tzu must have said something about that.

Unfortunately, the United States seem to have not just lost but abandoned and discarded wise leadership.  The dudes who did the Constitution--I was afraid if I used the term 'framers' I would be accused of using Greek--recognized how easily tyranny arises, and they recognized that democracies are subject to the worst sorts of tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority.  (I mean, if there's one guy who's a tyrant, you can just put him away in an iron mask or something, but that's harder to do if the tyrant is 50.5% of the population.) So, after dividing power up into three branches to balance each other, they added limits--the Bill of Rights--to restrain that power.

That was then.  This is now.  As Frederick Douglass said in in 1860, 'A chart is one thing, the course of a vessel another. The Constitution may be right, the government wrong.'  The United States now seems to have a government which is pre-occupied with shrugging responsibilities.  In order to avoid being blamed for mistakes, Congress gives more and more power to the presidency.  And then the president says, again and again, 'I accept no blame.'.  Harry Truman's motto 'the buck stops here' has come to have a much more lucrative meaning.  And each party fights to control the Supreme Court, not as a defender of the constitution but as enforcer of the party line.

One one side we have the folks like Nancy Pelosi, who doesn't just listen to the complaints of the people throwing tea into Boston harbor but rushes to put on her Pocahontas dress (pardon a mixed metaphor, please) and join them.  On the other we have the folks like Donald Trump, the new law-and-order version of George III, anxious to send in the troops.

I am not a big fan of Abraham Lincoln.  I think he could have been much slower to use troops.  But it sees patently clear that he was correct about one thing:  'A house divided against itself cannot stand.' Unfortunately, if the Great American Experiment has only been a card game, it has had very high stakes.

We'll have a gay old time.

In June of 1969, I was scrambling to take the last course I needed for a BA--Physics 101, ironically, which I took at Memphis State University.  The course was really dumb, and hardly got to Newtonian stuff, but it would let me finish my degree and teach in the Memphis public schools as one of three white teachers who were integrating a huge black high school.  It was a plan I thought would be better  than to go to Vietnam and napalm kids.  After a while in the Memphis public schools, I decided that napalm might be the lesser of the evils.  The Memphis public schools, for the poorest black kids, at least, were very evil.

I was in Memphis rather than in Vancouver, where I had thought I would finish my degree,  because I was fleeing from confronting my sexuality.  I had recently married, having heard informally that the love of a good woman would cure me. Well, that good woman was taking a class at Simon Fraser University and invited one of her classmates over to study.  Brian was perhaps the most beautiful creature I had ever seen.  I wish I had been able to tell my 22-year-old self to give Kathy the furniture and then  run off to Brian's ski lodge, where he had said he would teach me to ski.  Instead, having gone back in Jonesboro for what we thought would be the last Christmas with the family, I literally spent much of the time in a closet because I was so distressed.  The draft board sent a telegram to my mother's house on Christmas Eve.  (The chairman of the draft board was my brother's mother-in-law, so she knew where to find me.  She also suggested that I get a 'teaching in weird schools' deferment instead of going to Vietnam.). So I flew back to Vancouver, where Brian met me at the airport.  He helped me pack up the apartment and wait for the movers.  I enjoyed three wonderfully bittersweet days before he took me back to the airport and bought me dinner.  Years later, I went back to Vancouver to try to find him.  Silly me.

Before Brian I had had three significant 'gay' involvements.  I say 'gay' though we didn't have that term then except as it was used--ironically, perhaps in things like the Flintstones thmesong. Perhaps ironically, two of them had been with young black men.  Both had fairly significant influences on my life.  

Milton and I had met in 1965 at Memphis State.  He saw me in the student union and  said he liked my hat.  It was a huge stetson.  He was taking fencing lessons. We became friends, and had a bit of fun playing at sword fighting in the union and passing the hat.  I would win on the white side of the union, and he would win on the black side.  We would then have lunch with our collection. We became better friends, but did nothing I had to consider overtly sexual:  washing each other's backs, cuddling in cold weather.  But my landlady evicted me because 'she couldn't have that sort of thing' going on.  The next semester, Milton transferred to another school and our playtime was over.

Frederick and I met in 1966 at  a National Student summer thingy that I later found was an agent-provocateur event sponsored by the CIA.  We had been chosen as 'persons of interest', apparently.  Again, nothing happened to require me to think of our relationship as sexual.  We sunbathed on the root, wore each other's clothes, snuggled a bit.  He was a student in Lafayette, Louisiana, but spent summers with his sister's family on the south side of  Chicago, and I went to visit him there. I liked Chicago so much that I moved there to go to school.   It's I think worth noticing, because our thoughts and feelings about race are so complicated, that my father, who was firmly against forced integration, had no qualms about my visiting Frederick.  Indeed he had black friends, most noticeably a fishing buddy named Sykes.  I went with him to visit Sykes and Sykes brought his kids to visit us.  At the time I didn't think that odd, although my father took me to visit only one other of his friends.  Looking back, I realize that during that time in Jonesboro, he and Sykes couldn't just sit down together for a cup of coffee where my father usually hung out. I only realized how many black friends my father had when they turned up for his funeral.

I have been thinking a lot about those times the past two weeks as the 'peaceful protests' and 'rioting' have followed the killing of George Floyd, overlapping the 51's anniversary of the Stonewall 'Riots'.  There are a lot of complications around the current political unrest, but one thing has struck me as  hopeful, (in both the best and worst sense of hope, the last gift of the gods to Pandora), has been the difference in the way the press has covered the 'peaceful protests'.  (I use the '' around 'peaceful protests' not because I am denigrating them or considering them 'riots', but because it is really a quote of what the newsy guys are using in nearly every report.)  Anyone in the modern connected world would have to work very hard to avoid hearing about the post-George Floyd events.  In Memphis in 1969, I had no clue of the Stonewall 'riots'. And in New York, they were mostly met with contempt.  

There are of course a lot of differences between being gay and being black.  When I was in high school, two of my favourite novelists were James Baldwin and Richard Wright.  I was taught the obvious:  they were black. It was never mentioned what was possible to hide but which was probably what made them seem so interesting to me:  they were gay.  I doubt my landlady had a clue that Milton and I were sleeping together, even like puppies.  She just knew that he was black.  Had she known that we were washing each other's backs, she might have called the police. Being black is usually visible.  Being gay is not always so obvious.

Indeed there is a partially invisible man who was important in my life, a good friend of my father's whom I was only told was a 'very handsome Marine who died in the war'.  It was only after I came out to my mother, after my father had died, that I found out that Richard Dale, for whom I was named, was gay, and out, at least to my father.

Compare and contrast is a very imprecise rhetorical method. Ironically I began writing this little essay, which is quickly becoming a big essay, on the birthday of Alan Turing.

In civilized Great Britain, a country in which the BBC is now actively preferring the hiring of non-white folks to 'read the news' Turing was chemically castrated for the crime of being gay. I am not trying to play the my-victimhood-is-worse-than-your-victimhood game, because I know that in Philips County, Arkansas, for years black welfare mothers were surgically sterilized when they went to the public hospital to give birth. But it is true that for the most part, it's not illegal to be black, as it often has been to be gay.  At least in christian Europe, black folks get in trouble for being out of place, while gay folks get in trouble for being.  Things are a bit different in muslim Africa, where black folks are the norm and gay folks are illegal, and there are so far as I know now efforts to recruit white news readers.

I partially digress because I want to recognize the complexity of the times through which we are living.  The Stonewall 'riots', which didn't include nights of looting, were not widely reported nor did people take to the streets in cities around the world in 'solidarity' with gay folks.  But they have been widely credited with encouraging gay folks to become visible, to show ourselves.

Black folks are easily visible, and  for reasons that can be debated, it's easily visible that  black folks tend to be treated differently in the justice system from white folks.  (Although when I was getting a divorce in Tennessee thirty years ago, I was told by my (lesbian) lawyer that I should not contest any part of it because in Tennessee courts at that time I would probably be barred from having any contact with my children.) For all I know George Floyd was a closeted gay man.  I have had sex with men black and white who were deeply closeted and who, just as I, had children.  

So, here's a hopeful part:  police brutality sparked the Stonewall 'riots', and police brutality sparked the George Floyd 'riots'.  But the public attitude to that brutality had changed.  (Indeed this deep into this essay I realize that I might have compared the reaction to George Floyd's death to the reaction to the water hoses turned on peaceful protesters in 1963 Birmingham, because that outrage faded, too, but did lead to a call for much wider civil rights for all folks.) Police brutality against gay men and crossdressers was pretty much considered acceptable by the 'straight' community in 1969. Now police brutality is much less acceptable

But, be careful what you hope for.  'Justice for George Floyd' is itself a police and court matter.  Mobs are better at lynching than at making verdicts based on evidence.  Folks who have for years wanted the state to enforce their concepts of justice are now calling for the abolition of the police, without thinking that the police is how the state enforces justice.  Ruth Bader Ginsburg may be Superwoman, but she doesn't make house calls.

I confess that I, who am usually extremely. optimistic and dare  I say, 'hopeful', am worried. The French during their Revolution couldn't decide how to end the monarch that they had previously seen as divine without decapitating the king.  Soon the guillotine was king. Then they had a bunch of wars, which let Leo Tolstoi write a really big book.  And then they got their kings back.

Something's happening here.  What it is ain't exactly clear. 

Use your Camcorder, not your Polaroid.

When I was a kid and couldn't defend myself, my mother took me to a Souther Baptist Church, where the endpapers of the hymnals promoted a really big bit of fake news:  "As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end.  Amen.'

Unfortunate as it may seem to us enlightened folk in the twenty-first century, racism or something like it has been the default attitude of humans in nearly all places and at all times.  The Navajo don't consider the Hopi to be people.   The Hottentots did not consider the Bantu to be their  equals.  Shucks, Mark Twain had doubts about the French.  Rather the idea that all people, regardless of their 'race', should have equal political rights is exactly that, an idea.  An idea of Europeans, mostly English, thinkers during what we have come to call the Age of Enlightenment.  It's a fragile idea.

It's an idea that had been approached before the great adventure of Englishmen that led to their Empire and their empirical experiences with folk around a world on which the sun never set.  There were more or less equal political rights for all Roman citizens, whatever their race or nationality, and something like racial and even sexual equality had been suggested in the letter to the Ephesians, written during the Pax Romana, but both of those equalities were qualified, depending on  Roman citizenship or citizenship 'in Christ'.  They fell short of the 'all men are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights' of the Enlightenment founding of the United States.  It was this idea to which underpinned Martin Luther King's calls for racial justice, not some some traditions of African tribalism.  It was the idea of the Rights of Englishmen, the rights the American Revolutionaries were demanding, that underpinned Ghandi's call for social justice in Indian, not some values of the traditional Indian caste system.  (I've always wondered if the Black Muslims recognized the irony that it was black muslims who rounded up and sold so many Africans into slavery.  Of course, they weren't supposed to enslave muslims.)

However, just having an idea does not let it become a reality.  It has been, I would strongly suggest, the immense technological advances which were just beginning at the time of Locke and company which have allowed for the sorts of mobility and wide-spread wealth that we have come to expect.  Jesus may have had a nice idea with 'you feed them' when he did his loaves-and-fishes act, but it didn't seem that his followers could really do any such thing until the development of modern agricultural techniques in the twentieth century. And certainly ending slavery sounded nice, but it was not a viable alternative to thousands of years of human economics until the steam engine and its children were born. (Dare I point out that the inventions that make modern life with its social and racial and sexual and whatever you want to add possible are all offspring  of the same Enlightenment ideology which made it possible for Sundar Pichai to be the CEO of hugely successful Google, a corporation  which makes almost all of its money from and whose primary products are, ideas?)

Now, we folks tend to find stability comfortable, which is a big part of why the hymnals at my mother's church could get away with lying.We blather on about wanting 'real change' while the changes that surround us and which we hardly begin to understand keep us from sleeping at night. The changes in which we live and move and have our being are coming faster all the time.

Enter 2020, with the Covid 19 pandemic and the economic collapse that accompanied it.  I had been reading Aftershock, a book looking at the events following Alvin Toffler's tremendously important work Future Shock, which described some of the changes we might expect and how stressed they would make us.  But all of a sudden the future became much more dystopic than even our fears and worries had made it.  

Enter many more people staying at home and watching 'news' far more often than is healthy.  I mean, even I have started watching the NBC nightly news because it's such a bizarre lens and it comes from the same studios, more or less, as Dave Garroway and his apish sidekick that were my introduction to 'network news.'

Enter images of Minnesotan policeman leaning on the neck of a black suspect until he's dead.  All of a sudden that is the only story on NBC news. You want racism?  You want tribalism? You want identity politics?  You want righteous indignation?  We got it.  We're selling more hand sanitizer, i.e., soap, than ever.

There are studies to suggest otherwise, but  it does seem that in this country police are more inclined to use violence against black people than against white people.  It also seems true that black policemen are just as inclined to violence as are white policemen.  Or as asian policemen, something about which The Verge says we need to talk.  Now I realize that there are good cops. But there are also enough bad cops to make the good cop-bad cop meme work.  I have never had an encounter with the police in which I felt comfortable.  I have not been shot--although once there were six--SIX--policemen with drawn or hands-on guns surrounding me because I was hitch-hiking in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Only three policemen drew their guns on me in Bellingham, Washington, because I was riding a red bicycle.  I was kicked and pummeled and beaten with sticks for distributing a free newspaper in Memphis, Tennessee, but not unto death.  I suppose that police and brutality need to be two separate words much more often than they are, but governments make folks cops to use the force for which they claim a monopoly.  The sort of behavior we expect from the police in this country is part of the general, mostly English, Enlightenment attitude towards people.  Look at photographs of  police enforcing the Covid 19 rules in almost any part of the world, and it will not look much different from the treatment of George Floyd.

So:  Instead of looking at this moment in time as a Polaroid of how it always been and how it will be forever, I suggest we need to look at the long Camcorder video of where we have come from and the opportunities for improvement that lie ahead.  I suggest we need to pay little attention to what people say are their intentions and look at the means they are using.  We rarely achieve our intentions, but we are stuck with our means.  It is not as it was in the beginning.  It does not need to be as it is now forever.  

That we in this country are upset by racial injustices, by income inequalities, by differential treatments of different folks is our heritage from the Enlightenment.  Let us not discard that heritage and descend into barbarianism.  I for one prefer Amazon, with all of its imperfections, to a future in which I need to buy books at Mad Max's Bartertown.

These are not the best of times, I hope, nor are they the worst of times.  But they are just among the most stressful of times. They are perilous times.  The Washington Post 's motto is 'Democracy Dies in Darkness." No enlightening ideas have been developed by mobs, no matter their intentions.  

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.