The Unsettling of America

Wendell Berry is a farmer (though I doubt he does much farm work now; he’s very old) who is also a very good writer. Being a farmer gives him a perspective few writers have: the perspective that a majority of American citizens used to have a century and more ago.

Most of the population of the United States (of European extraction) were originally farmers. That began to end in the 19th century with the Industrial Revolution and the rise of technology. That process brought a lot of incredible achievements barely imagined before, but not all of these were positive.

Berry notes that one tendency of our country (and hemisphere) was exploitation. Slavery is one example, and so is exploitation of natural resources. The contrast of this country with Europe was the apparently unlimited resources, both agricultural and mineral available. Their very availability made people careless, leading to pollution and exploitation of humans as well as the environment.

For one thing, it began the exodus of millions of farmers and farm workers from the land to the cities, a process accelerated in the 20th century. Berry compares this with the same process in Russia, and especially in the Soviet Union. The results of that were more obviously horrible than in America, in part because the Soviets used military power to force farmers into collectives.

But in the United States, by the end of the 1940s (and probably earlier) the message was, “Get big or get out.” That wasn’t necessarily much better than the Soviet efforts, even if its negative effects weren’t as obvious.

Some of the farmers who failed simply weren’t good farmers, but the economics of farming turned against farmers with the increased use (and expense) of technology and the increased number of factories that needed laborers. Berry sees the predicament of farmers as part of the predicament of the country: carelessness and ill health in one part infects the rest. The exodus of farmers to the city broke up farming communities that one could say held the country together.

The Department of Agriculture, who backed the industrialization of farming, boasted that no more than 5% of the population were now needed to feed the whole country. Was that actually a good thing?

Berry points out that the industrialization of farming is great for businessmen, but not so good for farmers. A businessman doesn’t necessarily have a vocation for farming, and his aim isn’t the same as a good farmer’s: to make a living rather than a profit, and to have a healthy farm, family, and community instead of wealth.

Not that profit is necessarily bad, but it’s not good to subordinate every other aim to it. When that is done, one might as well sell illegal drugs or traffic in humans. But if one wishes to be moral, one has to have other considerations. Berry adds that if one doesn’t work where one lives one is insulated from the effects of one’s actions. He points out that university experts in agriculture aren’t farmers, and generally aren’t interested in real life solutions to problems. They’re interested in their careers instead.

One of the central issues is health, not only of one’s self and one’s family, but of one’s community and world. Nobody can start at the big end of that problem (and Berry says he suspects large solutions, and favors small and local solutions which can influence others instead), but each person can find a moral way to make a living and do that to the best of his or her ability. The only problem is that opposing concentrated power means the possibility of failure.

The method of “getting big” the Department of Agriculture advocated (as well as suppliers of farm equipment) was technology. Not only tractors that could pull plows and harrows, but artificial fertilizers, herbicides, and insecticides. Those products made it possible to farm much larger tracts of land than almost any farmers could before, but didn’t guarantee the work would be done well.

And Berry (in a book published more than 40 years ago–though the paradigm he talks about hasn’t yet changed,as far as I can see) says the work has generally NOT been done well.

Farmers are plowing too much land (thereby encouraging soil erosion) and using too many insecticides, herbicides, and artificial fertilizers. The former don’t only poison insects and weeds, but humans and animals too. The fertilizers often run off into streams and rivers, causing pollution that makes the waters dangerous to drink and unsafe for fish and other river and sea life.

We tend to think that our modern ways of doing things are self-evidently better than anything our predecessors came up with, but a little study disproves that idea.

Berry likes the idea of using horses and/or mules for plowing and other jobs. One reason is that heavy tractors compound the earth, making it harder for plants to grown. Another is that horses and mules provide natural fertilizer to the fields. The animals need to be fed, but the fertilizer they excrete is free, and offsets the cost of gasoline and the machines they power.

One of the disadvantages of using gasoline power on a farm is the expense not only of the fuel, but of the machines it fuels. That makes it harder and harder for new farmers (children of farmers especially, who also have to pay estate taxes and other expenses) to be able to begin, let alone continue as farmers. Having to borrow several hundred thousand dollars each year to put in a crop puts a terrible pressure on farmers to farm more acreage than they can thoroughly do. The economics of farming are stacked against the small farmer. And the Department of Agriculture sees the aim of farming (or did when Berry published the book–I doubt their view has changed much) as affluence.

Why affluence? Isn’t making a decent living sufficient?

One of the advantages of small farms (of which Thomas Jefferson approved) was that a farm farmed well could be largely independent and self-sufficient. The new technological paradigm of farming made the farmer more dependent instead of less. Dependent on machines and their fuels, dependent on the banks to finance each crop with the uncertainty whether he’d be able to pay his loan back at the end of the year.

I remember hearing, several decades ago, that farmers with milk cows were mandated to store the milk in underground tanks to prevent spoilage. The catch was that a farmer had to have a herd of at least thirty cows. Farmers with smaller herds were out of luck and unable to either compete or sell milk to their neighbors, as had been the custom.

And with the dependence solely on technology was lost the farming traditions of the pre-technological era, like crop rotation. The new paradigm demanded monoculture, never mind that it exhausted the soil besides creating erosion and pollution.

According to Berry, one can use artificial fertilizers if they make sense in a particular place, but it’s not necessary to use them everywhere. The same is true of tractors and the equipment they pull behind them. Some equipment can be pulled by draft animals just as well, at no more cost, and more healthily for the environment. He notes that hillsides can be farmed by draft animals much more readily than by machines, and that terraces can be used on hills, as the Chinese have been successfully doing for hundreds if not thousands of years.

Another example of traditional farm technology is that of Peru, where sides of mountains are farmed, and there may be five to seven climates on one farm. Each climate demands a different crop planted at different times. He mentions some fifty different varieties of potatoes, for example, and that farmers keep track of what each crop is good for, and the best way of raising it. Not only can farmers raise different crops in different places at different times of the year, but they also keep diverse strains of crops–some fifty different types of potato in Peru, for example–which not only can be raised at different times of the year, but can also resist blight and insects.

Using only one technique for farming is asking for trouble. Depending on artificial anything to the exclusion of other resources means dependence on chemical solutions rather than natural ones, and natural solutions are healthier. And a solution valid in one place may not be valid in another because of differing qualities of soil, climate and weather, elevation, etc.

Businessmen can farm and make a profit, but that doesn’t make them good farmers. The good farmer aims at farming well, rather than making a profit. If he does farm well, he will probably make a decent living. Being overly dependent on artificial technology and power generally means (as Berry frequently reiterates) sloppiness which doesn’t affect only the farmer practicing it, but potentially much of the wider world too. He links agriculture with the general culture of the country and the world.

Having tremendous amounts of power available sounds good, but much of it is wasted, as most of the oil discovered in this country before fracking was used in war instead of more peaceful pursuits. Berry also points out that using our human muscle power is more healthy than sitting behind desks (which seems to be the aim people who can no longer farm are supposed to pursue) and that pricing most people out of farming not only led to bad farming, but destroyed rural communities who used to depend on each other. Is it any wonder that illegal drugs are no longer just an urban problem, but have reached deeply into the rural part of the country too? That’s the kind of thing people who feel useless do.

But Berry also points out positive examples that dramatically contradict the propaganda about high-tech agriculture being the only way to farm. There are organic farmers who use little if any artificial fertilizers, herbicides, or insecticides, and they’re able to make a good living while bringing in comparably large crops. There are probably even more such farms now than when he was writing this book, and more farmer’s markets to go with them. Healthy food is much more available now.

Even more dramatic (though we usually hear little about them) are the Amish. They’re not only very good farmers (using draft animals exclusively for power and rotating crops to keep the soil alive and fertile), but Berry thinks they may be the only white people in the country to have real community, the reason being that they refuse to be dependent on technology.

Instead, all families work at various jobs around their farms, so they’re constantly busy. They don’t separate farming from practice of their religion, so profit isn’t their primary motive. And precisely because they depend little or not at all on technology, they’re freer than many of us. We may have more access to wealth and power than they, but does it make us happy? If so, why are there so many addicts in this country?

Maybe this is changing. Some Amish people get people to drive them to visit relatives who live some distance away, but they don’t use that technology themselves. And they know how to survive much better than most of us. If our powerful technology were to be taken away, many of us would be lost. The Amish, with their simpler technology, and with their knowledge of how to farm and do things independently of people they have to pay, would survive.

Technology isn’t evil in itself, nor is making a profit. But depending only on technology and profit-making produces an imbalance. We may very well have to sacrifice some of our technology, power, and wealth if we want to live healthy, and happy, lives. I think relatively few of us are doing so now, and that the problems of the world demonstrate our lack.

Robert Heinlein

I discovered science fiction in the junior high school library. The very first example I read was The Stars Are Ours by Andre Norton, whom I was later privileged to meet and correspond with. But I rarely read her work today.

Other authors I quickly discovered were Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert Heinlein.

I liked all three initially, but really liked only two of Clarke’s early novels, not the later ones. I liked Asimov’s generally better, but he gradually became more a nonfiction writer, and my interest wained.

Heinlein, though, was (and remains) a giant figure in science fiction. He had a great deal of talent and worked hard at his craft, specializing in stories heavy on scientific fact as best he knew it at the time (he has humans visiting Venus and its intelligent species in some books, not realizing that the surface temperature of the planet is between 600 and 800 degrees Fahrenheit), but also adept at fantasy.

Some of his early works were straight fantasy, like Magic, Inc, in which a demon tries to take over a business sector in the USA, and Waldo, in which a man with Myasthenia Gravis (extremely weak muscles) learns to draw on energies that seem supernatural, and expands his world into performing not only dance but surgery.

Other stories extrapolate the future, and he gathered these into what became called a Future History series. Of course the future didn’t conform very closely to what he wrote, but that didn’t make his opinions less interesting. Or the stories less compelling.

One such story was about roads that were like extremely long conveyor belts, and what it took to keep them maintained. Another was about a man who wanted to go to the moon, and all the financial moves he made to do so (the government isn’t involved, in this story). In the end, he isn’t allowed to do so, constrained by the corporation he partly owns.

But in a sequel, he hires two pilots to take him to the moon (rocket ships seem to be very common and easy to handle in this story). But by this time he is elderly, and the blastoff from earth damages him so severely that he dies shortly after landing on the moon. Happily, the story strongly implies.

From these short outlines you can tell the difference between his stories and those written in the approximately two decades before. Those stories were generally about alien menaces and the steely-eyed heroes who saved the world, or even the universe.Heinlein’s stories were about ordinary people caught in a futuristic situation.

Heinlein’s writing career began about 1939. According to Astounding, an account of the careers of L. Ron Hubbard (best known for founding Scientology, but a writer in the 1930s), Isaac Asimov, Heinlein and famous (in science fiction circles) editor John W. Campbell, Heinlein had tried writing before submitting any stories to magazines. The novel he tried to write wasn’t very good, but according to the author of Astounding, he apparently got a lot of bad writing habits out of the way.

A spaceman develops fear of falling, but gets over it. A girl living on the moon finds she’s more in love with her boyfriend (whom she claims to think of as a business partner) than she thinks. A man is thinking about his dead wife on the way to a great fair. The bus he’s riding in crashes, but there seems to be little damage done.

However, when he gets to the fair he suddenly finds his wife, and no longer has to be separated from her. Of course that’s more fantasy than science fiction.

Some critics note that Heinlein liked to write about extremely intelligent people, but that wasn’t always true. Many of his stories, especially in his early career, are about relatively ordinary people trying to the right thing in their situations. There are highly intelligent characters too, as in The Rolling Stones, about a family of intelligent people, especially twin boys, who manage to do some dumb things in spite of their high intelligence.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s Heinlein began writing young adult novels aimed especially at young men. He wrote 13 of them, and while all of them aren’t of high quality, a lot are as good as almost anything else he wrote. My particular favorites were Starman Jones and Citizen of the Galaxy, but I liked almost all of them.

I wondered at the time why Heinlein wrote about slavery in Citizen, since the USA had gotten rid of that institution after the Civil War. Later, I realized that de facto slavery still remains. Is that what Heinlein had in mind? It is in an earlier novelette, Logic of Empire. Heinlein includes not only business methods, but also glimpses of the legal system working–and not always in the interests of his main characters.

By the end of the 1950s, though, Heinlein said he was tired of writing for an editor who could veto what he wanted to say. He wanted to write exactly what he wanted, just the way he wanted. Sometimes the results were spectacular; other times not so much. But one example of him doing things his own way was when he was asked to revise his early sixties novel, Podkayne of Mars. He reportedly changed exactly one word. I suspect his publisher got the point.

Starship Troopers was one of the first of his serious novels not necessarily aimed at juveniles, and was controversial, since he suggested that the only people who ought to be full citizens were those who had served in the armed forces. His point was that these were people who had shown the willingness to sacrifice themselves for the good of their nation (or world), unlike most other people. Of course it’s easy to say that the issue is far more complicated, but the novel (which I recently reread) is extremely readable, as Heinlein almost always is, whether or not one agrees with his point.

The next such novel was Stranger in a Strange Land, which is his most famous novel, and I think landed him on the best seller list. It is about a human born on Mars and educated by Martians, and tries to show the world (pretty successfully, I think) through alien eyes. Probably many people overreacted to it, pro or con, but it remains one of his most memorable.

Then he had a string of mediocre novels: Podkayne of Mars, Glory Road, and Farnham’s Freehold. Podkayne wasn’t terrible, but Glory Road wasn’t a great fantasy (adequate might describe it), and the point that black people can behave just as badly as whites got obscured by the blacks indulging in cannibalism in Freehold. None of which made them less than readable.

His next novel, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, though, is arguably his best work, and in my opinion his last great one. It’s a story of the settlement on the moon declaring independence from earth, and pretty much includes everything Heinlein does well in terms of characterization and extrapolation. It also includes a self-aware computer who may be considered the hero. The plot is also excellent.

After that the quality of Heinlein’s writing declined, though he still has some interesting ideas. I Will Fear No Evil is about a very rich man who receives the transplanted brain of one of his (female) servants (I think that’s her status, but don’t exactly recall).

The concept is certainly interesting, but the book is overly long-winded (Heinlein was ill at the time, and apparently lacked the energy to edit it). This is also the beginning of rather obsessive writing about sex, which goes far enough in later novels as to regard incest as acceptable, at least in some cases, which is a bit far for me.

The next rather long book, Time Enough for Love, is about Lazarus Long, whose ancestors had been careful to marry people from long-lived stock, thereby becoming much longer-lived than average.

We first meet Long in the much earlier Methuselah’s Children, but Time Enough goes into his life and background at much greater length. He is obviously someone Heinlein identifies with, as he is born in about the same place and at about the same time. Long travels back in time to that era, finds his family of origin, becomes friends with them, and falls in love with his mother. At the end of the novel he is picked up by his friends from the future, one of whom exclaims, “Oh, you can never die.” Sounds kind of like wish-fulfillment to me, especially since Heinlein’s health was never as good as it might have been. Long  seems to be irresistible to women, with many progeny. He is also one of the Heinlein characters (usually older men) who enjoy pontificating.

There were several more novels before Heinlein’s death in 1988, which had some standout writing, but often weren’t too good overall.

But despite his flaws, Heinlein is almost certainly the most influential writer of the genre, at least in the 20th century. He managed to make almost any story he wrote seem realistic, even those like Magic, Inc, which were frankly fantasy.

As I said above, I liked the novels he aimed at juveniles almost as much as anything else he wrote. It occurred to me that he would like to have been a father, and have been able to bring up children. According to the author of Astounding, he was found to be sterile. He lived a pretty rich and full life, with a lot of travel, as well as patriotic service during World War II, but never having children must have been a disappointment to him. He seems to have channeled a lot of what he wanted to teach into his novels for juveniles, and the principles he expounds are usually good.

One area in which I have some disagreements with him is in his attitude towards the military. He began in early life wanting to make a career in the Navy, but couldn’t continue because of ill health. He would have liked to be able to be on the front lines in World War II, but of course that was precluded too.

Still, it seems a little odd that his political opinions changed after he left his first wife (who was liberal) and married his second (who was conservative). That may have had something to do with the cultural shift that began after World War II, but hadn’t become extreme until the 1960s.

I can’t argue with all of his opinions. He despised Communism, which is understandable enough, but that led to his support of the Vietnam war. I wasn’t exactly surprised, but was disappointed he couldn’t see beneath the surface to examine the other motives for the war by the United States.

While his attitude towards sexual freedom was a bit extreme for me, I didn’t object to the idea of responsible people indulging responsibly. I was mostly disappointed that the quality of his writing declined with age, even though he still remained readable.

I don’t know that he’s my all-time favorite writer, but he’s certainly one of them.

Who Gets Bailed Out?

Congress is trying to decide how to structure a new stimulus package. One of the issues dividing the two parties (and Senate and House) is about continuing the addition to unemployment benefits, as House Democrats want to do, or reducing it, as Senate Republicans prefer. The argument of the latter is that families are making more through unemployment than they would from their jobs. Republicans think that’s a disincentive to returning to work.

What they don’t mention is that there’s an even greater disincentive, at the moment. Ordinary American workers, the kind that can’t work from home, know that working in close contact with other employees or with the public puts them at risk of catching the virus and spreading it to spouses, children, and others. Surely business owners know this too, but seem to prefer coercing people into returning to work whether they feel safe or not.

It also doesn’t make sense, in that one of the conditions of unemployment insurance is that one must be actively seeking work, and must take a job if offered.

If individual workers aren’t given the money they need to survive (in the absence of their being able to return to work safely) and the protections against eviction aren’t renewed we’ll have a lot more homeless people before long. Who will benefit from that?

It seems pretty clear that employers want employees to work so the economy won’t fail. That’s a reasonable fear, but if they don’t want economic failure, giving money to the people most likely to spend it seems like a good strategy. Wealthy individuals and corporations have a choice about whether to spend money or not. People just barely getting by even when working full time don’t. They’ll spend money because they have to, and the economy will be stimulated.

But money is being given to large corporations in preference to individuals and small businesses, according to Time magazine.

I think the choice is stark: stimulate the economy or increase the number of homeless people.

I repeat: who benefits from people becoming homeless?

Crescendo

Crescendo is a movie about the organization of  a youth orchestra bringing together young Israeli and Palestinian musicians. I don’t know if it’s based on a true story, but I’m sure there have been a number of efforts to bring the two groups together, probably musically as well as other ways.

The conductor assigned to this task is an older man, and though he’s initially reluctant, he seems to be wise about how to get people to open up and cooperate.

After the musicians are chosen he tells them to yell all the bad feelings they have against each other. After all that is in the open they can get down to rehearsing.

Once the musicians have been selected they’re taken to the Austrian Tyrol to rehearse. They are to end with a concert, and it’s not clear what happens after that. The conductor talks to a young Palestinian man about studying music with him in Europe, but the young man is reluctant, feeling obligated to continue working with his father playing music at weddings and other community functions.

At least two scenes made me cry, at least partly because of the music. The first is when the orchestra plays a portion of Dvorak’s New World Symphony, music I dearly love. When the music ends the conductor tells them they’re no longer just Israelis and Palestinians, but musicians able to work cooperatively to produce beautiful music.

Sometime after this he tells the orchestra that he had grown up in the region of Austria where they’re rehearsing. His parents had been Nazis, and as World War II was ending had tried to escape, but had been killed near the border. He says he had been devastated and bitter for a long time, but now he had gone to Israel, and had had the privilege of working with young and talented musicians like them.

Only a little later, when they’ve gone on an outing a car drives by and throws what looks like a paint-filled balloon at the conductor. He isn’t injured, but we are left to infer that someone in the region doesn’t like what he’s doing. Very likely they don’t like Israelis; they may not like Palestinians either.

Meanwhile, a Jewish girl falls in love with the Palestinian young man spotlighted throughout the film. She seduces him, then foolishly sends a picture of them together to a friend. The friend sends the picture to her parents. They are not pleased.

They tell her she must come home, and send her uncle after her. She decides to run away instead, and persuades the Palestinian boy to go with her. They’re stopped along the road, and when they try to run away we hear what sounds like a vehicle running into what sounds like a body. We never learn the exact details, nor who did it, but learn that the boy is dead.

The girl is taken away by her uncle, the concert is canceled, and in the last scene we see the two groups in the orchestra in an airport waiting room, separated by a plastic or glass barrier. The intention of the orchestra seems to have been entirely frustrated.

But then the young Israeli man gets up, goes to the barrier, takes his bow and taps out the rhythm to Ravel’s Bolero and begins to play its theme (another piece of music I dearly love).

Slowly the other Israelis join in, followed by the Palestinians. That’s the second scene that moved me to tears. Nothing concrete has changed, and yet because of the collaboration and cooperation of the two groups there seems to be the possibility of reconciliation.

The bitterness between Palestinian and Israeli is written large what exists between many of us, in this country and throughout the world. Bitterness and fear usually prevent us from solving problems, and often plunge us into violence. This movie reminds us we have other potential choices.

No Direction Home

The documentary by Martin Scorsese about Bob Dylan focuses on what was the most dramatic part of his career: the beginning of it, which lasted about six years, from 1961 (when he released his first album) to 1967 when he came off a long world tour, had a motorcycle accident, and decided not to continue down the path he was going. My first reaction when I heard about the movie (which is fifteen years old) was, why?

No, there hadn’t been a movie to cover all of that part of his career, but a lot had already been written about it, and I thought there probably wasn’t a lot more to say. I’m not sure anything new was said in the film, but all of it was worth hearing, if not very enlightening. You do get a picture of a young man making his way  very quickly, the scene he was in, and the people he knew. No question it’s a good story, and of course Scorsese makes outstanding movies.

Young talents, particularly in the world of arts, but not confined to that world, are often spectacular, but become more mediocre as the artists age. The distinction between Dylan and others was that his development happened more quickly and took in more aspects of his work than most.

Arguably, he recorded his best album at age 24. The Beatles weren’t much older when they recorded their two or three best albums. The Rolling Stones were a bit older than that, but Dylan and the two bands are similar in having, after their most striking work, retained the facility they’d developed, but not the touch of genius that had made their works compelling.

It’s interesting to see Dylan as a young and chubby Jewish boy in the years before he got famous and at the time he recorded his first album. He comments in the film that the songs he recorded actually weren’t ones that he performed in concert very much, which seems a little odd.

But the changes between his first and second albums are striking. In his first album he recorded only one original song, to Woody Guthrie, whom he idolized. And he did it by using a method Guthrie had also used: taking the tune of another song, by Guthrie, who had also borrowed the tune, and putting his own lyrics to it. Like Guthrie, he would borrow music and words too in the future. We are left to infer that had he not felt compelled to write Guthrie a song expressing what he felt he owed him, he might never have begun writing songs at all.

In his second album things had changed radically in no more than a year. He had thinned down, and the cover showed him walking down a snowy street in New York City with his girlfriend at the time, Suze Rotolo. And only one of the songs he had recorded was borrowed from anyone else. He’d written all the rest.

Blowing in the Wind was the one that began to make him famous (I never cared much for it, even though the lyrics were appropriate to the time) since it was recorded by the already famous Peter, Paul, and Mary, but there were other good songs on the record too. In the movie he comments that he had really gotten into songwriting, and wanted to get as far into it as he could. And his fame began increasing exponentially as he released each new album.

His third album was mostly original material too, and most of it was protest songs. That one I never listened to, though I heard some of the songs. A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall was probably the most impressive one in terms of poetic imagery, but there were worthwhile others too, and he was becoming popular in certain liberal circles for his lyrics about current events. But then he decided to change again.

Many artists in various media find a style and something they want to say, and rarely vary either style or message. But a lot of artists don’t want to get locked into any particular pattern. Dylan was seen as a folk music artist, and the folk music scene abhorred electric music. The real purists thought it should all be acoustic and imitate as closely as possible previous artists and recordings. That was imprisoning, and Dylan decided he wanted to explore other ideas and forms. In that respect, at least, he hasn’t changed in the decades since. He’s tried out a variety of styles, and his messages have changed over time.

Part of the reason he changed was probably drugs. He used marijuana for sure, and probably LSD, which certainly must have opened his mind to a lot of things. His mind was already pretty open, as he tells us in the memoir he published about 15 years ago. There he speaks of going through newspapers on microfilm from the 1850s to get some idea of what was happening in the United States at that time. How many young men would even think of doing that? He also says he often stayed with friends early in his time in New York, and those friends often had interesting books, which he looked at, even if he didn’t read them straight through. So he talks about being impressed by a poem by John Milton, something I would never have considered reading at his age. Paul Verlaine too.

I don’t know that his political beliefs changed (one commentator in the movie says he’s pretty sure Dylan had feelings for underdogs),  but by his fourth album he had other things he wanted to write about, more internal things. I liked that album, but haven’t listened to it for a very long time, and it wasn’t one of his most popular, though other artists did cover songs from it.

That album began to upset people, but his next one upset them worse. Bringing It All Back Home was half acoustic and half electric, which disturbed fans who believed he should only play acoustic music. Although he had become fascinated with folk music before his career actually began, he had listened to a variety of music: country, blues, and jazz standards, and had had a rock & roll band when he was in high school. Much as he loved folk music, he didn’t want to get locked into performing only that.

He was never a virtuoso as a musician. He didn’t come up with a lot of riffs to draw attention to a song. Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead once said in an interview that he was extremely good at fitting lyrics to music, or vice versa, a related but different skill, and it was his lyrics that were vivid rather than his instrumental playing. So if he wanted the musical part of what he did to be more vivid, electric amplified music was an effective way to do it.

I bought his Highway 61 Revisited album, and didn’t understand a lot of it, but felt its power. His lyrics before had been incisive, like Only a Pawn in Their Game, about the killer of Medgar Evers. Now his lyrics became surreal, but still powerful, even if you didn’t understand what he was talking about or what kind of story the songs tried to tell. Joan Baez says he told her that someday people would be arguing about the songs he was writing, and what they meant, and that he didn’t know where they were coming from, nor what they meant either.

I’ve had an experience like that on a very modest level. If you decide you have something to say and start writing a lot you eventually begin to write good things–at least some good things. Of course my percentage was much lower than his.

After recording Blonde On Blonde, another classic, he went out on a long world tour, and drastically overworked himself. After coming home he had a motorcycle accident, broke a bone in his neck, and allegedly detoxed from the drugs he had been taking to keep going. After that he kept writing songs and recording them, but didn’t go out on the road again for a long time. I never saw him perform, but I was one of the people who became disappointed in him.

In my case it wasn’t because he started playing electric. I didn’t care about that. I’d been listening to rock & roll for two years when he released Like a Rolling Stone. and liked that kind of music. I was much more upset at what he chose to do after he started recording again.

John Wesley Harding wasn’t a terrible album, but it was kind of odd by comparison with what Dylan had done before and what others were doing. Worse, from my point of view, followed. Nashville Skyline was country, and though I’m not a big fan of country, what bothered me was that he seemed to be writing superficial songs that were meaningless. Self Portrait I liked even less, as many of the songs were by other artists, and the originals didn’t seem very good.

In his memoir published a little while after the movie was released, Dylan pretty much admits that he was upset by fans demanding more of him than he wanted to give, and that some of them who showed up at his door at almost any time frightened his family. So he wrote songs that weren’t very good to get them to lower their expectations. The problem with that, the way I saw it, is that he didn’t write very good songs anymore–at least not very often.

One album seemed to be an exception: Blood on the Tracks. I loved one song, Tangled Up in Blue, but didn’t listen closely to anything else. And what I heard of the music that followed seemed to confirm my opinion. There was nothing more for me there.

That’s approximately when he began his Christian period. But I heard that as being preachy in an unattractive way, and lost interest in what he was doing.

Others felt differently, of course. Musicians still liked what he did (although Country Joe McDonald of Country Joe and the Fish said he didn’t believe the late sixties version of Bob Dylan, which was pretty much how I felt). Tom Petty’s band and the Grateful Dead both toured with him, but by that time I was long past being interested.

Which is not entirely true. I read a book that was partly about Dylan’s work in the nineties and early in the new century, which was interesting, but when I listened to one of the albums analyzed, it didn’t make much impression on me. Maybe it was just too subtle.

In one interview Dylan said something about having worked to achieve a position. He certainly had done that by the end of the 1960s, guaranteeing that people would always pay attention to his work, even if it wasn’t very high quality.

But maybe me disappointment was because he was no longer moralizing in what to me was a compelling way. Maybe he had embraced ambiguity in a way he hadn’t earlier.

Reading about his later albums seems to show that he embraced a wide variety of music, much of which could be called folk music. Music from the 19th century as well as obscure songs from the 20th. He always listened more widely than most.

So maybe he decided to do what he enjoyed, musically. He’s been touring more or less continuously over at least the last two decades, so presumably he enjoys performing. If he doesn’t want to write songs with clear and significant messages no one can compel him to do otherwise. It might be accurate to say he was a great analyst of many things wrong with the world. I can’t blame him for not wanting anyone to believe he could heal the world. That’s another, and much more burdensome responsibility.

But I remain disappointed, probably unrealistically. Great artists seem to promise us many things, and he promised more than most, whether he meant to or not.

In a way, I think maybe the decades since the sixties are what we ought to be focusing on. What are the messages he’s been trying to communicate since then? Is he just putting out product that he can perform, product that really doesn’t mean much, and if so, is that deliberate?

Maybe that’s what Scorsese should have tried to find out.

Sacrificing

Let’s talk about sacrificing. It’s something lots of people do, whether voluntarily or because they must, and there’s a lot to be said for it.

Theseus, the ancient Greek hero, lived about 1200 years before Christ, and Mary Renault published two novels about him, and pointed out that his life had a great deal to do with tension between two different religious positions.

The Greeks entered what is now known as Greece approximately 4,000 years ago. They found people living there unrelated to them, with different DNA, language, and customs. By the time of Theseus’ birth the two cultures had been living together long enough to become somewhat used to each other.

Renault has Theseus be introduced to the idea of sacrifice as a young boy. The king horse of his grandfather’s small kingdom is about to be sacrificed, and Theseus objects. His grandfather tells him the sacrifice must happen, and Theseus asks why. His grandfather tells him it is a mystery, and that the sacrifice will please the god, thereby benefiting the  people of the kingdom. After all, the king horse was treated very well when he was alive. Now his sacrifice will pay for his good treatment.

From this beginning he learns that when serious problems come up that the king can’t resolve he is expected to sacrifice himself for the good of the people he rules.

When Theseus decides to travel to Athens to be recognized by his father he runs into a different culture and a different custom.

This is in Eleusis, a small kingdom of what the Greeks call the Shore People. Both they and the Greeks are polytheistic, but the Shore People primarily worship the Mother goddess, while the Greeks primarily worship male gods.

The Shore People sacrifice their Sacred King every year to make sure their crops grow and babies are born. The basic idea is the same, but the Sacred King of the Shore People has no choice in the matter. The Greek idea is that voluntary self-sacrifice gives the act its power.

Sacrifice was very important in the ancient world. It may once have been human sacrifice almost exclusively, though eventually animals began to be substituted for humans in most cases. But in important cases human sacrifice was considered more effective.

On reaching Athens Theseus is acknowledged by his father, but then decides the only honorable thing he can do is to join the teenaged boys and girls demanded by the Cretans (the most powerful nation in the Mediterranean at that time) to dance with the bulls, which was another form of sacrifice, though it had also turned into a spectator sport like much later examples.

While in Crete he manages to kill the Minotaur and escape back to Athens with all the people in his group. They stop on the island of Naxos on the way where he witnesses the people trooping into the mountains where they drink wine and frequently have sex, using the day as a way of blowing off steam and expressing powerful feelings in a usually safe way. This was their way of worshiping the god Dionysus, the god of wine. Renault expresses it as having a day to dedicate each person’s craziness to the god so that it won’t come out in some more inappropriate way.

But the ritual wasn’t safe for the Sacred King, who was often literally torn apart, as were animals, by the celebrants. Whatever the nature of the ritual, it released a great deal of energy. Camille Paglia tells us the word sparagmos is the word for animals and even people being torn apart. Theseus is repulsed.

Later, after establishing himself as king of Athens, he takes a trip to the Black Sea, finds a group of Amazons there, falls in love with one of them, who is known as King of the Maidens, and persuades her to come back to Athens with him.

Still later mainland Greece is invaded by a huge number of people, including the tribe from which Theseus’s wife came. After withstanding a siege for sometime, the Athenians attack their besiegers. Theseus is ready to die, and throws away his shield. He feels a spear or arrow coming towards him, and simply waits for it. But it doesn’t hit him because his wife, also a warrior and king, has cut in front of him. Since she was also a king, she could also make the sacrifice.

Theseus feels first empty, then enraged, and becomes berserk, unable to remember afterwards what happened. But he and the Athenian soldiers have driven the besiegers away.

Renault points out two other times in later Greek history in which the leader of an army made sure he died first so his side would win, so the idea of voluntary self-sacrifice continued, and arguably reached its apex with Jesus Christ,  the first self-sacrifice we usually think of.

But that didn’t make self-sacrifice popular. Powerful people preferred to make others sacrifice themselves for the benefit of their leaders. When Theseus is in Crete he sees the bull dancing, which he finds beautiful and exciting, as also less solemn than it should be, and the society as decadent. The Minotaur, who is the heir to the throne of King Minos in Renault’s telling, Theseus sees as sacrificing others for his own benefit, which is sacrilegious, in Theseus’s view.

Kings eventually stopped being sacrificed every year, and the custom of voluntary self-sacrifice died away too. The tradition of kings leading on the battle field passed slowly, but after the Middle Ages it rarely happened. Kings, dictators, and presidents stayed home and let others take the risks. It came to be considered patriotic to die for one’s country, but that applied mostly to the lower classes, The hereditary nobility had once been the military class, but became less important, and the most powerful and important people in most countries are no longer the military. Powerful people are no longer expected to sacrifice for the common good. Sacrificing is almost entirely the province of the poor now, because they don’t have the power to excuse themselves.

There was a lot of self-sacrifice in World War II. I find it amazing how the English were able to continue with their lives during heavy bombing of their cities, while cleaning up the destroyed buildings and taking care of injured civilians. But the war in Russia dwarfed what happened in England.

Hitler believed he could beat Russia quickly, and almost did so. Had not Russian troops been transferred from the far east to Moscow, the Nazis might have taken that city, and that might have effectively ended Russian resistance.

As it was, the war’s turning point came first at Stalingrad, and then at Kursk, where the Russian army stopped the Germans and sent them retreating back into eastern Europe. It took a lot of supplies from Britain and the USA, but the Russians had to do the fighting, and they did, at immense cost. Reportedly, one of the reasons they fought so hard was that deserters were executed, but I doubt that was enough to motivate them so strongly. That war is still called the Great Patriotic War in Russia, and that’s how Stalin had to sell it: a war to save Communism wouldn’t have gone over nearly as well, since everyone knew about the purges, famines, and prison camps of the Soviet Union. Apparently everyone felt they were in the same boat, especially after the Nazis had killed large numbers of people fairly indiscriminately.

Today the poor in the USA are being asked to sacrifice themselves again, and a cursory look on Google says that they don’t want to. A closer look finds that 49% of those polled are equally concerned with lives being lost and the financial impact of the disease, while breaking it down further (in one article) 26% were more concerned with saving lives, and 19% with the financial impact. There is also concern that, because of insufficient ability to test, we simply don’t know how much risk remains in going back to work.

Then there’s the question of who benefits most by the economy reopening. Some seem to believe it’s the people dependent on a regular paycheck, but polling seems to deny that. Of course such people are concerned, but most don’t want to reopen until they can be confident that most of the danger of infection is over.

And that suggests that it’s primarily business owners who want to reopen. In the case of small businesses, this is quite understandable. They have fewer resources than large corporations, and can’t afford not to work for long periods. Which is why I think small businesses in particular ought to be bailed out, along with families and individuals. During the Great Recession of 2008-9 it was the large corporations that were bailed out, and when the economy began to grow again it grew anemically. If anyone is to be bailed out, let’s do it from the bottom up. Poorer people will spend the money because they need to, while wealthier people will be able to save it. Poorer people are more reliable stimulators of the economy than rich people, who have more choice about whether to spend or not.

I’ve heard at least some politicians say that people shouldn’t be coerced into returning to work, but that doesn’t seem to be the common position. The president, and others of his party, want the economy to reopen for political reasons: they want to win elections in November. This is similar to the position of the gun lobbyists who are less concerned with the danger of children being killed in mass shootings in schools than with their guns possibly being taken away. They have been willing to sacrifice the children, and rich people are willing to sacrifice poor ones.

I think that, in the abstract, most people would be willing to agree that voluntary self-sacrifice has more power and virtue than coercion. The problem begins when the principle is applied to ourselves or people we know.

 

The Childe Cycle

I don’t remember when I read Dorsai, the first novel in Gordon R. Dickson’s Childe Cycle, but it can’t have been many years after I first discovered science fiction, about 1960. I was in what was then called junior high school and discovered I could take study halls in the library, which I did, in order to find interesting fiction. I wasn’t very interested in studying for my classes then.

And I hit what I considered a motherlode: a science fiction novel with the idea of traveling to other stars. That was a mindblowing idea to me, and I began exploring as many other science fiction authors as I could find, and the experience of that was thrilling.

In the 1960s I began buying and subscribing to as many science fiction magazines as I could, which was also thrilling, as it was (in my opinion) a particular fertile time for a lot of great writers. Gordon Dickson was one of the writers I encountered then. So I don’t remember exactly when I read Dorsai, but I read it and the three novels following it in the sixties, at least one serialized in a magazine.

The series was a tremendously ambitious undertaking. Dickson had a theory about human evolution. He thought a particularly important phase of it had begun in the 14th century, and was continuing. His view of this development is one many might disagree with, but I see it as at least an interesting theory that may well have some validity. The series he began in the future, but projected at least three historical novels and three contemporary novels to fully finish it. Unhappily, he came up considerably short–at least seven novels short.  Still, the nine he finished (plus a volume of several shorter stories) are worth reading and considering.

The first four novels, setting the situation up, are relatively short, along with some even shorter stories. But the next novel (published 14 years after the previous one), set in the further future where most of the important action of the series takes place is much longer: almost 700 pages, and it’s brilliantly sustained throughout. In it, Hal Mayne, the primary protagonist of the whole series, goes from being a teenager cast adrift when his three guardians are killed to becoming a man, and learning not only who he really is, but what his purpose has been for more than one lifetime.

Dickson says, in an introduction to a collection of stories, that he had been thinking of the series for 35 years. As the book in which he says this was published in 1986, that means he had had it on his mind since 1951, seven or eight years before he published the first novel in the series. And the series has not only been ambitious, but highly successful in attracting readers, a tribute to Dickson’s ability as a writer.

He said, in that introduction, that his concept was that each novel must be a complete story in itself, but must also fit within the series, whether to the previous or succeeding novels or not, making the series a very long novel rather than just a series of stories in a specific universe. He managed to find a theme that would fit that concept. There had been such a science fiction series before him, but none that long with such a strong design (there have been a few since).

The series begins with a military genius who also has a highly developed intuitive sense which allows him to foresee developments and either assist or frustrate them. He also eventually manages to travel to past and future to guide things as he believes they ought to go.

The basic situation is that humans have learned to travel between stars and colonize the planets of those stars. They have also split up into groups that are oriented to certain specialized points of view. There are worlds devoted to science, business, and technology, but these are the less important cultures.

The important ones are, one, the military on one world, the Dorsai, that has to make its living sending its young men out to be mercenaries. This is the one Dickson seems to identify with most, and the novels are written largely from the Dorsai point of view, and one of the early novels shows how an earlier military genius invented new military tactics and trained Dorsai soldiers to be able to carry them out. This made it possible to achieve military objectives quickly and with very few casualties, also enabling them to charge more for their services.  Their world is military, but it’s also an extremely ethical world, something not always necessarily included in the military worldview.

Two, the two worlds of faith, based on the more extreme versions of Protestantism. They also use their young men as mercenaries, but they aren’t as militarily gifted or trained as well as the Dorsai. Faith is their vocation and contribution. These seemed less immediately attractive to me, but Dickson shows how important their faith is to the human future. Their faith is a powerful discipline, which can turn into fanaticism, but which can also inspire them to worthwhile goals and to self-sacrifices individuals from other cultures might never consider.

The third group is the Exotics, based largely on Hindu, Buddhist and other esoteric teachings and techniques. They have deep insight into human psychology, and often provide other worlds with psychiatrists and other types of healers.

The long range vision is that all these types will eventually coalesce with the rest of humanity, giving it the deeper talents that have been developed in relative isolation. Of course this process can go wrong, whether through mistake or inappropriate behavior.

The series has nine completed novels, which I am reading consecutively right now, something I never did before. As I read, I find myself especially impressed not only with Dickson’s vision, but with his writing, which keeps my nose in the story and thinking about the broader implications of what he writes.

And, as might be expected, there are, in a work about a particularly broad, possibly apocalyptic crisis, parallels with present conflicts.

One character sees his group as superior to the mass of humanity, and doesn’t want his group to be subjected to the majority. He wants a superior position from which his group can lead the human race toward an action he believes necessary. This is to give up the colonized worlds and learn again how to live on planet earth without the distraction of technology. This group is called the Others, and is formed mostly of people born through intermarriage between the different cultures.

This sounds inoffensive and seductive enough, but the character to whom he expresses it who, it turns out, is a “version” of the military genius of decades earlier (he doesn’t know it yet), whose name is Hal Mayne, finds he is rejecting the offer to collaborate. The reason, he realizes, is because all his life he has been surrounded by people serving a greater cause than themselves, and that the seductive offer is by someone who wants a superior position for himself and his followers for its own sake, and to try to enact a destructive agenda. He wants to dominate so no one will be able to dominate him, and he is able to work toward such a goal because he’s extremely gifted in intelligence and ability to manipulate. That person’s belief that the human race has taken a wrong turn is stated, but never really explained, except in terms of his feeling of terrible isolation.

He is isolated because he is more intelligent and able than anyone he knows, and because he’s felt he must protect himself against manipulation and domination by others. He has therefore learned to manipulate and dominate in his turn. His name is Bleys Ahrens.

Serving a greater cause than one’s self, as Ahrens believes he is doing,  (but in Hal Mayne’s opinion, is not) is a concept many of us, perhaps most, give lip service to, but it’s not really a popular vocation. The worldly point of view doesn’t favor it, and the fact that it often entails great suffering tends to make it unattractive. Or course people like to claim they do things unselfishly, and may often believe it, but I think it’s rarely true.

Not that selfishness is always and forever wrong. Resisting tyranny may often be appropriate, but often also raises questions about whether it’s actually tyranny one is resisting. There must be a balance between the claims of the individual and those of the community. Either can be unjust, but humans need both. There’s nothing wrong with competition, as long as it’s ethical, but humanity has advanced at least as much through cooperation.

But cooperation is more difficult–or at least seems to be. The popular argument in favor of Mussolini’s Italy was that the trains ran on time. The argument in favor of Hitler’s Germany was that it was anti-Communist, Communism being apparently the extreme opposite of individuality. Actually, Nazi Germany was just as opposite, despite superficial differences. Both regimes used secret police and concentration camps to enforce compliance, and spread toxic ideologies into the world which infected millions then and since.

Of course those ideologies were also present in so-called free countries. European countries (and the United States) were no less based on force than were totalitarian societies. Democratic forms of governance are more difficult to follow correctly, and are as vulnerable to the mistakes authoritarian or totalitarian governments make, but ultimately have the potential to be much more rewarding for humans in general.

The problem with authoritarian governments is that they want to impose stasis on their citizens. They don’t want the experimentation which provides new forms of being or organization which might threaten their power. And this isn’t a problem just of authoritarian governments, but of other authoritarian organizations which influence governments. Racism is one of the ways powerful people have attempted to impose stasis on others.

Suppose, as Dickson does, that in some sense the human race is one organism, and that various forms of governance and different social emphases are its way of testing methods of survival. Organizations that try to force everyone into a single mold are therefore counter-survival. Life more abundant at least strongly implies the use of ALL human talents. Which makes the machinations of racism and class warfare deeply self-destructive, though of course those practicing them believe they do so in order to survive, themselves. Part of that problem is defining human community too narrowly.

Hitler came close to annihilating the German people he claimed to love. The Japanese nearly did the same. Who knows what the victims of Stalin’s purges might have contributed to a peaceful Russia. Or the repressed and slaughtered blacks and natives of the United States? Massacre seemed an acceptable tool to those leaders and cultures. In many minds it probably still does.

So the universe Dickson portrays is one with great significance to our time, and perhaps to any time. I think the question becomes whether social practices are imposed by force, or not. Force has been the basis of all developed societies we know of, and is part of the so-called primitive ones as well. The use of it to enforce conformity is present everywhere, to greater or lesser extent. Though there’s somewhat less in the United States than other countries, the question of how force can coexist with freedom remains. All answers to that question seem to be temporary and provisional. And what is possible for the individual may be impossible for the great majority, certainly as a group.

Resistance to tyranny is a theme of the series. Donal Graeme, the main character of the first novel, resists the efforts of a greatly talented businessman to unite the sixteen colonized worlds, but unites them himself in a different way before sending himself into the past to guide humanity’s development.

The reason he decides to travel to the past, it develops, is because he realizes that humans aren’t persuaded to behave appropriately by law. They can be forced, but not persuaded, and he wants humans to realize that violence is not only inhumane, but ultimately useless. He comes to this determination because one of his uncles, a mercenary, is killed in the line of duty, and he feels the man’s death has been only a waste.

But he becomes a military man himself, and uses his abilities to pursue his dream of leading humans to a higher level of consciousness.

Building empires has been the main historical thrust of politics. One group conquers another, and the really successful groups go on to conquer more territory. Sometimes their governments last a very long time, as with the Roman empire. Sometimes their time is very short, as with Genghis Khan’s Mongols. But as is pointed out in one of the novels, the empires that last a long time are the ones that change. The ones that don’t change don’t last very long, because they stop growing.

The form of empire taken by the United States is unusual, in that it doesn’t require total occupation of the countries we dominate, but we have an empire nonetheless. Perhaps we are embarrassed to call it that, but that’s what it is, as demonstrated by the almost 700 military bases we have in other countries.

So I suppose the question this history leads to is, why do humans feel the need to build empires?

Of course power leads to material wealth, but is that enough to explain the drive? Why did the Medes and Persians conquer so much of the Middle East and then try to conquer Greece? In retrospect it seems obvious that their attempted conquest inspired resistance, which came in the person of Alexander the Great, and opened up the Middle East to not only the Greeks but the Romans, forcing a cross-fertilization between different cultures which wasn’t always pleasant, but ultimately enriched the peoples in both areas.

While asking that, we might also ask why the Persians allowed the Jews to return to Judah from Babylon and rebuild their Temple? Was it just good politics, or was there some other, deeper reason?

For that matter, why have Americans sought domination over foreign countries, but also become one of the most charitable nations on earth? Our wealth allows us to be charitable, but is that the only reason?

Isn’t this the presence of both competition and cooperation in our culture? The two clearly don’t fit together perfectly, and competition often seems to dominate, but on the individual level especially, charity and cooperation are also very important. Could the pioneers have survived without cooperation? But at the same time as they were settling and putting roots down they were also competing with the native people whose land they were taking and the outlaws who tried to steal from them. Every region has its own history of the operation of both tendencies.

Dickson’s series was supposed to end with a version of Armageddon in which the Others tried to force the compliance of those who resisted them, and then some sort of solution was reached. Unhappily, Dickson didn’t live to write that part. The series ends with the two groups facing off against each other, with no resolution in sight and the fear that the race would die if the Others were to succeed.

We’ve been through that movie before as a species. The two World Wars, especially the second, must have felt like the world was ending, though it didn’t.

The issues we face now are much less easy to see than those then. Our current issues are less with the open hostility of other cultures and ethnicities than with the very bases of our technological culture. Poisoning the world to provide the developed countries with tremendous wealth can end, if not the human race, at least our current way of life, leaving most of us with few comfortable choices. Not many people are happy at that prospect, and they will probably be even less happy when they have no choice about it. We can learn to live without much of the technology we have. Our ancestors did, but they didn’t imagine the comforts and conveniences we have now.

We see tyranny as something imposed from outside, but in our current lives the tyranny of comfort and convenience is something we are complicit in. Perhaps we wouldn’t be if we could see the impact our lifestyles have on people in other countries from which we get the natural resources we need, but we don’t see, and often don’t want to.

It is often the artists who are best able to see what’s coming, and Henry Miller, in a book about the 19th century poet Arthur Rimbaud told how he had managed to ruin his life, dying before he could reconcile the opposites in himself and his culture, which, as Carl Jung in particular has pointed out, is necessary to the process of what he called “individuation”. Such a process enables an individual to rise above the ordinary and perhaps take responsibility for the necessary reforms of society. Miller also included a list of 19th and 20th century artists who similarly ruined themselves, suggesting they found their culture toxic.

The process has also been called initiation, which was famously practiced at Eleusis in ancient Greece, and was a meaningful factor in the culture of the ancient world.  The main character of the later part of the series, Hal Mayne, is a Childe, the term for an aspirant to being initiated into knighthood, and has actually had three lifetimes in which to learn to be human.

The first was as Donal Graeme, the military genius, who knew how to maneuver people into positions, but didn’t yet have empathy, especially for ordinary people. Nor did he yet have the creativity he needed to enter what he called the Creative Universe, in which he could have access to his subconscious at will. The subconscious is closely related to creativity since it contains all the things a human has experienced and learned, along with the archetypes that mark the path of a hero.

John Woolman was an 18th century Quaker who became convinced, in what might be considered an initiatory experience, of the evil of slavery, convinced the other Quakers to free their slaves, and, with them, began to work for the abolition of the practice. The American Civil War came no more than a hundred years later, but as is now clear, the practice never really went away. The institution is gone, but human trafficking is its underground version, and there remain many parts of the world in which other equivalents of slavery remain. Humans aren’t eager for the kind of responsible behavior that would end the problem.

We tend to see the question as, who will be the slaves, and who will be the masters? Like the problem of how to sustainably power our civilization, this question has yet to be worked out. Few people want ALL groups to have equity and a voice in how things work. Democracy is at least potentially more inclusive than other forms of government, but ours has systematically excluded groups the majority hasn’t liked. Few countries have done any better, and exclusion is a perennial temptation, one from which it’s possible to make lots of political capital.

It’s possibly even more difficult in this country, since so many of us are immigrants, and from many different cultures that make it supremely difficult to come to agreements. Many people are frightened by strangers who don’t look like them or believe the same things exactly. And when people are frightened they can be persuaded to do terrible things.

Dickson’s series at least implies all these things, even if he doesn’t treat them all directly. But of course the key to making a better society is for EVERYONE to reach a higher level of consciousness, and this is very difficult. Spiritual teachers have been pointing towards higher consciousness for millenia, but attaining such consciousness is very difficult, and many aren’t interested. If such teachers have had a large-scale effect, it’s difficult to discern. War hasn’t disappeared, nor does it seem likely to.

And Dickson’s series ends before there is any real resolution of the problem his hero faces, so we don’t know for certain what he would have written. Hal Mayne does manage to consciously enter what he calls the Creative Universe, and to bring someone else with him, which gives some idea of the possible conclusion. The ideal end would be for Mayne’s counterpart to be persuaded that he need not dominate to be safe.

That counterpart, Bleys Ahrens, is comparably gifted, but wants to end the pioneering attitude in humanity. Of course colonization and pioneering has led to injustices, but a static society would prevent humans from reaching their true potential. Pioneering isn’t merely settling new territories, but exploring how the world actually works as well as different attitudes towards it.Our inner worlds and attitudes will have to be explored, sooner or later, if we are to learn to survive the changing conditions of our world, physical and emotional.

The last three novels Dickson completed in the series are about Bleys Ahrens, and though skillful enough, I don’t find them as successful as the novels in which Hal Mayne is the protagonist.

For one thing, Dickson doesn’t indicate how Ahrens came to the idea that the human race should retreat back to the mother planet. He does have Ahrens say he wants Hal Mayne, the most able person he knows of, for a friend, which indicates he doesn’t have many other friends, and no others able to understand him. Elsewhere, he has Hal Mayne say that Ahrens wants to change the human race so he’ll feel less alone. Mayne, by contrast, has formed attachments with other people, and found admirable qualities in them, even if they are less gifted than he.

 

There is a persistent legend that high civilizations existed in the distant past, and there’s some evidence to think this is true. But there seems to have been a catastrophe, memorialized in the Bible and elsewhere as the Great Flood, which seems to have ended that civilization, though knowledge still exists that seems to have come from it. If a comparable catastrophe should come soon, it would probably be the so-called “primitive” peoples who would survive, the ones who know how to find food and other necessities, and adjust to extreme changes in their environment. Our high technology doesn’t fit us for primitive life, which makes us weaker than indigenous people we tend to look down on.

Technology isn’t necessarily bad, but it can be if people don’t have wisdom about how to use it. Nor is competition necessarily bad, though it can lead to destructive behavior.

Dickson did what artists do: explain what he has learned and intuited about the human condition. But artists can only point the way to solutions; they can’t solve any problems for us, which makes it difficult to understand how Hal Mayne, Dickson’s protagonist and spokesperson, would manage it. The series he wrote is a seriously important work by itself, but I wish he had managed to finish it.

Harry Potter

The Harry Potter books are old news to most people, but not to me. About twenty years ago I joined a science fiction/fantasy book club and arranged to have the first four volumes of the series sent to me free–all that had then been published, I think. I read those, but no more for a long time. I moved to another state and found other things to do.

Until I began reading them again a week or two ago. I had forgotten a lot of what I had read previously. I had enjoyed the books I’d read, but couldn’t remember much of the story.

The books are constructed cleverly. For one thing, England has a whole genre of books about experiences of students in school, and the idea of a school of magic much like the schools many English people are familiar with is attractive. So is the idea of magic (even though some literal-minded people find it scary), and the idea of a sort of parallel world in which people do many of the kinds of things we do, except powered by magic instead of the sort of technology with which we’re familiar is an attractive one.

They have their own postal system (letters and packages delivered by owls), their own train to take students to Hogwarts (the magic school) leaving from platform 9 3/4, their own newspaper and magazines, and a Ministry of Magic to regulate magical activities.

But of course there’s a much more serious side to the series: the conflict between Good and Evil.

The backstory is that the villain, Lord Voldemort, had dominated the magical (or wizarding) world for some time, and had perpetrated a reign of terror. As such people do, he attracted a number of people who enjoyed bullying and murder. They had the chance to indulge themselves under his auspices.

But his reign had ended just after the birth of Harry Potter. Lord Voldemort murdered Potter’s parents and tried to murder Harry too, but that backfired on him disastrously. He lost his body, though he didn’t die, and it took him some time to regain it.

Meanwhile, Harry Potter matriculated into the magical school of Hogwarts and began to learn how to be a wizard, a subject no less difficult than many of the professions taught at our universities. He greatly enjoys himself there, having lived for ten years with his uncle and aunt who had no use for him and treated him badly. At school he finally has friends and is able to discover and exercise his talents.

But bad things keep interrupting him. There are bullies at the school and elsewhere, and worse than bullies. There are a lot of parallels with Nazis and other authoritarians in Lord Voldemort and his followers.

An example of Rowling”s cleverness is that she depicts magical paintings and photographs as being alive in a way our photographs and paintings are not. In one house a painting of the owner of the house screams frequently in protest against the kind of people her son brings into her house, calling them Mudbloods and blood traitors. Mudblood is very similar to terms used by racists in the United States. Blood traitor may also be a term used here, but I think it was also used in Nazi Germany, or something very like it.

That illustrates the paranoia of the “pureblood” wizards who support Voldemort (or He Who Must Not be Named, or You Know Who), which is ironic because Voldemort himself didn’t have parents who were both magical. His father was a Muggle (the term for ordinary unmagical people), and Voldemort became an extremely powerful wizard without having magical blood on both sides.

But his kind of ideology doesn’t depend on facts. It depends on fear and anger. Voldemort had been brought up in an orphanage after his father deserted his mother and she then died in child birth. An orphanage is a wonderful place to be a child.

The way Voldemort and his supporters behave agrees with my view of authoritarian societies: they’re frightened, desperate for control of the people they both fear and look down on. They enjoy punishing anyone they dislike, more or less violently. Our own country has always had its authoritarian aspects, in spite of our democratic ideals. Democracy has never been valued by all citizens, and many people have seen freedom as their freedom to enslave or otherwise mistreat others. This is depicted quite clearly in the Potter books, as followers of Voldemort behave sadistically, even when not with overt violence. Harry and his friends resist.

One way is by forming a group to practice defensive magic. This only makes sense when Voldemort and his followers are attacking people and the teacher supposed to train them in defensive magic only allows them to read the textbook. Potter and his friends form a group to practice the actual spells, which Harry teaches.

This group forms one of the bases for resistance to Voldemort. Others are people Harry has befriended and tried to help, including house elves. These are beings basically enslaved by wizards, something most see nothing wrong with. Harry meets one who warns him of a plot against him, and eventually manages to set him free from his master, a follower of Voldemort who abuses the elf.

Another house elf is from the house with the shrieking portrait, which Harry inherits after his godfather dies. The elf is old, and loves his mistress, who has passed away, but Harry and his friends befriend him, praise him for helping them successfully, and he becomes friendly in return. The house elves fight on Harry’s side at the final showdown with Voldemort.

Harry and Voldemort are like two sides of the same coin. They both were parentless and brought up in uncomfortable circumstances, to say the least. But Harry has retained an innocent good nature which responds positively to friendship. Voldemort doesn’t believe in love, only in intimidation and power. He sees murder as the way to obtain security. And, as Harry’s teacher comments, the only people who can really be trusted with power are those who don’t lust after it, but undertake it as a responsibility.

And one of the ways he has used it is to split his soul into several pieces and leave parts of it in various material objects. This is why he didn’t completely die when he murdered Harry Potter’s parents, and tried to murder Harry. Harry’s mother gave her life to try to protect him, and in some way not entirely clear, did so. As Harry’s teacher later explains, Voldemort at that moment deposited part of his soul in Harry, which made it possible for Harry to sometimes see through his eyes and know what he was thinking and feeling.

Voldemort, like most dictators, would never be willing to sacrifice himself for anyone or anything. He always prefers to sacrifice others to his desires, which are entirely for power and revenge. Rowling doesn’t depict him as having any sexual feelings at all, though one could imagine him as being sexual without being loving. Hitler and Stalin had sex lives, though we may suspect they weren’t very fulfilling.

So in one of the climactic scenes in the last book of the series Harry confronts Voldemort and allows Voldemort to strike him down without trying to defend himself, in an effort to end the conflict for good.

In the final confrontation Voldemort sneers that Harry’s teacher, who has been guiding Harry in his attempt to finish Voldemort never dreamed of the kinds of magic Voldemort has performed. Harry replies that his teacher DID dream of them, but realized he couldn’t trust himself with that sort of temptation.

In our world few people are that wise. People with a desire for power gravitate to positions where they can have and exercise it, like government and other large organizations. It’s very tempting for powerful people to misuse power, whether on a national or local level.

Harry survives the attempt to kill him,  and when he confronts Voldemort for the last time he knocks the wand out of Voldemort’s hand and Voldemort’s killing spell rebounds on him, and he finally dies for good. And his death is really his own doing, having chosen a path both cruel and ultimately ineffective. Even his followers seem not to miss him, since he never cared about them, except to use them.

There is one final scene 19 years later in which Harry and his friends are sending their own children to Hogwarts. It’s an optimistic scene,  and may be somewhat too optimistic. The world doesn’t always snap back to “normal” life after a great catastrophe. Sometimes there are Dark Ages for centuries afterward when great amounts of knowledge get lost and take a very long time to find again.

We live in fearful times, as Harry and his friends do through much of the series. I think it’s important to try to remember that love and friendship in the long run are more powerful than hatred and intimidation. Our forefathers tried to set up a system in which we could work out our disagreements without violence. That hasn’t always worked, and sometimes we have behaved as badly as peoples who made no pretence of governing by anything but force. I think it remains worthwhile to try to be better than that.

The Who

I’ve always felt that being a musician was to be part of a pretty exclusive club that I partly envied, but partly thought wouldn’t really fit me. I loved a lot of the music I heard, but thought of having to go through a lot of misses to get to the good stuff, and then how old it could get having to play the same songs each night. The Grateful Dead both improvised and played LOTS of covers, but they got bored.

But part of what fascinates about music is how people can join together all pulling in the same direction to come up (at least occasionally) with greatness.

The Who were pretty much the most basic form of rock band, but what they did with that was unusual, and I think those variations are interesting.

They started by playing covers, like most bands, before they began writing their own songs: lots of blues and r&b, plus early rock & roll like Summertime Blues, one that they kept in their repertoire later.

But what I find interesting is how they evolved in playing. They were founded by Roger Daltrey who gradually brought the others into the band. He had originally played lead guitar, but at some point stopped doing that to just sing. In a documentary he tells how he found a jar full of amphetamines the band were using, threw them away, and was thrown out by the others. They let him back in a couple of days later, but he said that since the band was his life, he realized he couldn’t get his way with them by fighting, though he wasn’t reluctant to fight. And although he was the lead singer, he was somewhat overshadowed by the rest of the band.

Townshend had been influenced by a guitarist in another band who played both lead and rhythm, and became the primary songwriter. He also evolved a kind of windmill action with his right arm to play power chords, which made them more dramatic, and bounced around on the stage in a way that made it very plausible that he was using speed.

But the instrumental geniuses in the band were John Entwhistle, the bassist, and Keith Moon, the drummer. Moon was very fast, doing things other drummers wouldn’t even try. An interesting comparison is with Bernard Purdie, a top session drummer seen in a documentary about the making of Steely Dan’s Aja. Purdie, who had experience with many artists, was a very precise and efficient drummer, and in the documentary demonstrates how he plays a shuffle. Moon, by contrast, was very busy and athletic as a drummer–much different and, according to Entwhistle, difficult to play with, but his role was different too. He really propelled the band and was the one who kept them together.

Entwhistle took on a different role than most bass players in playing lead and rhythm too. He’s the one playing the power chord in Pinball Wizard, as I was surprised to see when I saw him do it live. He said he played lead and rhythm as well as bass, while Townshend only played lead and rhythm. He also helped make Marshall amps popular among musicians of the time. The Who were one of the really loud bands then.

I’m pretty sure the first song of theirs I heard was Happy Jack, apparently about a developmentally disabled man bullied by children, who was happy anyway. That was followed closely by Boris the Spider (“That’s not music!”, said a scandalized German friend). After them came, pretty quickly, Substitute, I Can See for Miles, and Magic Bus.

At that point I thought they were just a singles band. They hadn’t done an album that impressed me yet. The Who Sell Out did have them playing commercials between songs, which was kind of a cute idea, but wasn’t exactly compelling. But better was to come.

They were, after all, very ambitious, perhaps especially Pete Townshend, the guitarist who wrote most of the songs. Their next album was Tommy, which had a tremendous concept, and became one of the most famous albums of its time, also spawning a movie, and goodness knows what else. I didn’t think the execution matched the concept, though, personally.

Besides Pinball Wizard, which I lately read was almost an afterthought, and which turned into the best song on the album, I thought the best song was Eyesight to the Blind, though it was done much differently than its author, Sonny Boy Williamson II did it. The rest I wasn’t too crazy about, and that was after seeing it performed live almost fifty years ago. I saw Townshend leaping around playing guitar in what I thought was a pretty disconnected way, and wasn’t terribly impressed. Listening to the album again after about 50 years confirms that opinion. The concept and story were great; the music mostly wasn’t. It was the same problem Pink Floyd had with The Wall. Some of the songs were exquisite, but there were too many for many to be really good. That album was an example of their reach exceeding their grasp.

The concept, though, had a lot to do with Townshend’s interest in Meher Baba, a Sufi teacher. Tommy is a deaf dumb, and blind boy because of his hysterical reaction to trauma. But MOST of us are deaf dumb and blind to the life we live and which goes on around us. When Tommy has a breakthrough and recovers his sight, hearing, and speech, he tries to teach others how to live more abundant lives, but discovers they don’t want to know. That’s a story that has been repeated many times.

Sometime after the concert mentioned above, I was in a grocery store in Holland, heard a song playing and immediately fell in love: Won’t Get Fooled Again. As soon as I got back to the USA I bought the album and found it was excellent. I still love it.

I especially appreciated Won’t Get Fooled Again because it was a song about revolution, and the idea of revolution was superficially popular just then because of the Vietnam war and what people had begun to realize when thinking about it. I had already begun reading about Nazism and Communism in my teens, trying to understand why anyone would want to behave that way, and had come to the conclusion that violent revolution was a bad idea unless there was simply no other option. You never know what you’re going to get from it.

The American Revolution had its difficulties and dislocations, but overall it was very fortunate. Although the colonists loyal to Great Britain got persecuted, it was a lot less violent than later revolutions. The French revolution had the Terror, and Napoleon became dictator because of it. They had several further revolutions too.

The Haitian revolution should be admired because the slaves who began it managed to win and expel the French slave owners. Unfortunately, they were only part of a small island in an area in which there were four great powers hostile to what they’d done: Great Britain, France, Spain, and the young USA, whose slave owners were nervous about revolution being exported by black seamen and others. Had Toussaint l’Ouverture, one of the leaders not been kidnapped by the French and imprisoned in the alps, where he died of pneumonia, the Haitians might have continued to support and improve the army that had won them the revolution. Without that army, they were easy prey to the great powers, and there has been a rift between the very rich and very poor there ever since, so Haiti remains one of the poorest countries in the world.

The Russian revolution was supposed to overthrow autocracy, but turned into an even worse autocracy than the Czarist regime. The Chinese revolution was much the same.

Townshend apparently realized that there are humans much attracted to autocracy. In a documentary about the making of the album, Who’s Next, he says the song Won’t Get Fooled Again is  a plea: PLEASE don’t get fooled again. Its last line is, “Meet the new boss/same as the old boss”, which says it pretty clearly.

That album was the exact reverse of Tommy: it began as a concept which refused to come together for Townshend, but the songs were much stronger (and fewer) than on Tommy, and the music was generally better.

And on this album I really loved the guitar playing, which I thought was much more connected than when I’d seen them in concert. Maybe especially in conjunction with the synthesizer music in Won’t Get Fooled Again, in which he and the rest of the band interact with the synthesizer–which turned out to be difficult when they tried to reproduce it onstage, and the recorder didn’t work, or the band came in at the wrong place. It’s gorgeous on record, though.

I don’t really know why I didn’t buy another Who album until several years later with Who Are You? I liked the title song, but very little else.

By this time I think they’d begun to decline as a band. Amphetamines and maybe cocaine and other substances had begun to take a toll–Keith Moon was to die not long after the album was released from an overdose of brandy and horse tranquilizers, supposedly, and Townshend was also deep into substance abuse. They recorded an album in 1982, and didn’t record another until 2006, by which time Entwhistle had died too. I haven’t heard any of those later albums, though I mourn the loss of their very different voice, and of the very talented and able musicians who contributed so much to it.

But I did recently listen to Quadrophenia, the album that followed Who’s Next, and which inspired another movie. Townshend and the critics seem to agree it was their last great album. I’ll have to listen to it more, but I’m inclined to agree.

It’s a shame they let the substances get to them, and had only a relatively short time producing really GREAT  music, but they’re far from the only ones in that boat. The Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, and the Beatles all hit a peak early in their careers, and never seemed quite as good again, though they still had facility. The Rolling Stones postponed their decline until their thirties, but also declined precipitously. I guess it’s a difficult position to be in, trying to produce creative music while dealing with touring and business, to say nothing of the temptations of wealth, particularly at that time. Creative people in many fields tend to be better when they’re young (not always), and pressures and temptations make it difficult to continue.

The Who were never my favorite band to the exclusion of all others, but they had a period in which they were ONE of my favorites, and that”s how I feel about them (at least the period between forty and fifty years ago) right now.

World Series 2019

We had a really odd World Series this year. First, while Houston won 107 games in the regular season, Washington only won 93, the same record as my Cleveland Indians, who couldn’t even make the playoffs.

And Houston was a National League team for most of its history until it was changed to the American League a few years ago. Washington was an American League team the whole 20th century until not one, but two teams relocated to more radiant pastures. This Washington team began as the Montreal Expos until they were moved about 14 years ago.

On top of all that, was another rarity: each team won only in the other team’s park. Besides that, Washington made the World Series in any version without their arguably biggest star, Bryce Harper, who left the team as a free agent last year. Nobody expected them to do anything.

Houston especially didn’t expect them to hit their two best pitchers, but they did–and DIDN’T hit their non-star pitchers. Houston’s biggest star pitcher was Gerrit Cole, whose season record was 20 wins, 5 losses in the regular season, and who hadn’t lost since May before starting the first game of the Series. But Juan Soto, who wasn’t even 21 yet, is a great hitter, especially of high fastballs.

The rest of the team hit Cole too, and gave him his first loss after 19 straight wins. Max Scherzer struggled through five innings, but didn’t give up any more runs.

The second game was started by Justin Verlander, who won 21 games during the season, opposed by Stephen Strassburg, who had had his best season with 18 wins. And Washington overpowered Houston, winning by 9 runs.

The scene then shifted to Washington, and the Nationals stopped hitting, shut down mostly by Houston’s second-line pitching. At that point, I pretty much gave up on them. How could they possibly beat Houston again, who not only had great pitching, but great hitting and fielding? And if they couldn’t win at home, how could they win in Houston again?

I couldn’t tell, as the last two games weren’t on any channel I could get. So I was amazed and delighted when I found Strassburg had won the sixth game, and Washington began hitting again. They didn’t hit much against Cole, but managed to knock him out and hit the relief pitchers.

Scherzer had had to miss an earlier start, but managed to make the last start of the year. He struggled again through five innings, but Washington continued to hit, their relievers continued to pitch well, and they took the game and series. It was only the second time a Washington team had won a World Series, and the first time in 95 years.

That team had the great Walter Johnson, near the tail end of his career on it, and he had been the hero of the final game after having lost two previous games in the series. And this was in the Babe Ruth era, just to make the win even more impressive.

The Washington Senators (first in war, first in peace, and last in the American League) made the World Series twice more (the last time in 1933), but couldn’t win one. Then, in 1959, the Senators moved to Minneapolis and became the Minnesota Twins.

Not only that, but after Major League Baseball replaced the team, it was moved AGAIN, this time to Texas, to become the Texas Rangers.

Will Washington be able to repeat, or at least compete? They do seem to have a lot of talent, but that doesn’t guarantee anything. Houston has a lot of talent too, and that didn’t translate to a World Series win–this year. The New York Yankees have a lot too, but couldn’t get past Houston. The LA Dodgers were in the past two World Series, but couldn’t win either one, and couldn’t get there again this year.

In fact, baseball has a tradition of talented teams being humbled. Probably the most impressive was when the Chicago Cubs, who had won 116 games out of 154 in 1906. They had to play the Chicago White Sox, whose nickname was the Hitless Wonders. But they hit in the World Series, and against arguably the best pitching staff in the Major Leagues.

That was in 1906, so not many people remember it. More recent was the 1960 World Series, in which the Pittsburgh Pirates beat the almost certainly superior New York Yankees, who were in the midst of a streak of winning 15 pennants in 17 years, and 13 World Series wins.

And baseball is essentially a humbling game. A hitter can fail 70% of the time and be a great player. That percentage guarantees failure in almost any other sport and, on the other hand, players who have been unimpressive in the regular season often manage to play well in the post-season.

Such a team was the Oakland Athletics of the 1970s who had an excellent pitching staff and played great defense, but most of whose hitters couldn’t be considered great (Reggie Jackson was an exception). But in the playoffs and World Series the team not only made great defensive plays, but got unexpected decisive hits. They won three World Series in a row before a number of their best players became free agents and went elsewhere.

I am currently rereading Jim Brosnan’s The Long Season, about his experiences as a major league pitcher during the 1959 season. It’s different because it was written by the pitcher himself, without any ghostwriting help, and the pitcher wasn’t a star. You’ll find few baseball books that AREN’T about stars.

The time period isn’t quite archaic baseball. By 1959 the Boston Braves had moved to Milwaukee (and would later move to Atlanta), the Philadelphia Athletics had moved to Kansas City (and would later move to Oakland), the Saint Louis Browns had moved to Baltimore and become the Baltimore Orioles 2.0, and the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants had moved to Los Angeles and San Francisco respectively.

It was still and era in which major league players had to take off-season jobs to survive, and Brosnan worked in an advertising agency, which must have been unusual. And he’s a creature of his time in enjoying drinking and chewing tobacco (the latter only at the ballpark, apparently). He also likes jazz, and tries to make the most of his trips to other cities. He’s married, with children, and his inlaws live in Virginia and South Carolina before desegregation, which REALLY makes the period seem remote.

His point of view makes the baseball player’s life seem enjoyable, but precarious. He pitches well in the preseason, but gets off to a bad start in the regular season, and is traded. The rest of his season goes better, so he’s more fortunate than some, who can no longer hang on to a major league paycheck, or will never be able to play in the majors except for brief periods.

His desire to pitch well falls somewhat short of desperate. He’s trying, but he’s also professional, which means he doesn’t allow himself to get either too high or too low too often. When he calls the season long, that’s exactly what he means: getting too worked up about one’s performance is counterproductive. For six months there will always be a next day to prove one’s self, so failures must be forgotten, lest they snowball from being allowed to affect one too deeply.

I first read the book in probably the first year that I began following major league baseball and bigtime sports generally. I liked his second book, Pennant Race, better because that was his insider’s view of the Cincinnati Reds pennant winning year, 1961. Unfortunately for them, they ran into the New York Yankees, who that year had Whitey Ford win 25 games, Roger Maris hit 61 home runs, Mickey Mantle hit 54, and a cast of thousands of less known but still very talented players. The Reds never had a chance.

Luckily for those of us who like to root for underdogs, the Washington Nationals this year DID have a chance. And made the most of it.