Y’all think you’re new. All a generation or two old and unoriginal. You’re all yesterday’s news and don’t know it. Mostly anticipated in the Sixties. A few hip-hopped in ridicule.
I just love this thing, which bills itself as a Venn Diagram. Found it recently when I was looking for something else. (Sources for it here and here.) It succeeds, I’m sure, beyond its designer’s wildest dreams in depicting the precipice on which our culture now stands, all without mentioning political parties, cell phones, or social networks. This is the rationalist model writ large. All the category names around the perimeter contain overlapping flavors of nonsense sneered at by the professional skeptics who presume to know so much more than the rest of us. It’s impressively voluminous, but that means there are ways in which it is, well, talking too much. I’m going to be spending some time explaining that last statement, but I’m not going to apologize. When a thief tries to sell you a noose, it’s too good an opportunity not to ignore it but to tighten it around his neck.
Truthfully, the olive drab, shield-shaped pentagon in the center should be dressed in some sharply contrasting color (or empty) because it’s obviously the most important region of the diagram, the visual highlight, the position of control over the rest of the so-called nonsense. In Venn terms, it’s the apotheosis which contains and make sense of all the other regions of the diagram. But that would have disrupted the esthetic design of the creator, who is intent on showing us an intrinsic order of things that relate in some meaningful way. The pentagon at the center is here the function of five perfect Easter Eggs of nonsense, which overlap harmoniously to demonstrate graphically the intuitive rightness of the conception. It is therefore a muddy mixture of all the colors it comprises, and because its originator has no belief in meaning as a concept, its content here is a mere placeholder, an afterthought which is not an apotheosis but a crude and very partial example of the rest.
Now for some content observations:
First, some general points, in no particular order. ‘Nonsense’ is a strong word, sweeping in its dismissal of everything it’s applied to. By definition, it represents a judgment that something said, written, or done is utterly without value, devoid of interest, and either stupid or silly or both. The choice of a Venn diagram* for communicating absolutist determinations is interesting in this regard. The Venn is not a quantitative tool in any respect, neither scientific nor mathematical, and is in common practice a mere presentation tool, a thought-starter meant to suggest possible relationships worthy of consideration. Used here to suggest relationships between topics that are definitely not worthy of consideration. A funny irony. But the vast scope of the content and the designer’s intent are not at all funny. To see this, we’ll need to look at some of these hundreds of bits of nonsense in more detail. Not all of them (rest easy…). Just enough to see how far reaching it is and how disingenuously compiled.
So. You see that I have pointed in various ways at items on the “nonsense” lists which are, at a minimum, debatable. Obviously there are numerous other items which are, obviously, nonsense. Which ones are those? I have not concerned myself particularly with the question of who created these lists. He seems to be, on the face of it, an Eastern European pseudo-intellectual more or less indistinguishable from the smug, grinning professional skeptics who make a living from the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, and PBS. It doesn’t matter who he is specifically, because he speaks for millions of those who believe that the only province of rational minds is those subjects that can be counted, weighed, measured with real and virtual calipers, and studied to the point of proof or disproof in a laboratory, under precise clinical conditions. Their response to this so-called Venn Diagram is a breezy, grinning, “Well, yeah. That’s it in a nutshell, right?”
Wrong. Truth is, anyone who basically agrees with the purport of this diagram is less intellectually rigorous than those they are gang-jeering at. Bigfoot (uh, Yeti) is nonsense? Every major inhabited region of the world has independently developed an anecdotally transmitted legend of primate breeds that correspond to the definition of “Bigfoot,” including North America (coast to coast), Australia, China, Siberia, Tibet, Indochina, the Himalayas, and parts of South America. Who’s missing? England, a country that killed off all its wildlife a millennium ago, the seats of blind reason we admire as France and Germany, and the continent of Africa, where science has always taken a back seat to malnutrition, malaria, and murder. We’re supposed to,overlook the fact that serious scientists are bravely pursuing Bigfoot based on all kinds of evidence that exists despite the lack of a dead body that can be weighed, MRI’ed, dissected, measured, and filed away in formaldehyde-filled flasks. One real scientific field investigator archly observed, “When Bigfoot is finally found, it won’t be by me. It will be discovered in the bottom drawer of a back room of some natural history museum.”
Crop circles? Yeah. Two old duffers with boards strapped to their feet, snickering the night away in jolly old England at our expense. They did all these, right? Two old assholes on their home from the pub stomping around in their Wellies and giggling the night away. Right.
Same deal with cattle mutilations (‘bovine excisions’… cute) and UFOs. Do they exist at some level above the metric of “nonsense”? Yes. Serious scientists are seriously studying the evidence, even some evidence which can be counted, weighed, measured with calipers, dissected, and filed away in a bottom drawer of some museum somewhere. People keep misquoting Carl Sagan, probably to his post-mortem delight: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.” Not what he said. The sentence is frankly unscientific. Proof is proof. Period. Never needs to be anything but ordinary, well, proof. Even if it’s counter-intuitive. Like Euclid repeatedly demonstrated. What Sagan actually said was probably correct: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Which works both ways. It is possible in many states of our nation to be convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison without a dead body. The rest of the evidence has to be extraordinary to be sure, but not all cases of unexplained human disappearance are automatically “nonsense,” even to the myopic eyes of the legal system.
Intelligent Design? No, not nonsense. Increasingly, the Darwinian theory of evolution probably is nonsense, much like the once vaunted “consensus” of the scientific community about Eugenics and Climate Change caused by human industry. All three of these scientific delusions are based on antique mechanical metaphors which missed much more complicated underlying realities. Eugenics, founded on Mendel’s genetic research on peas was ultimately undone by the guy on the top floor of the lab who was ignored for the six years he was studying the genetics of fruit flies, which defied all his concerted efforts at predicting even so small an attribute as eye color. The Eugenic Consensus wreaked untold numbers of sterilizations and abortions based on bad data. Avoidable errors. Same with climate change science. Is the climate changing? Yes. That’s what climate does. It changes all the time. It’s weather writ large on a much greater than human scale. (Did you know that the weight of all humankind is approximately equal to the weight of all the ants on earth? A bit sobering, eh, but a verifiable statistic nonetheless.) The computer models devised to predict the effects of climate warming have ALL failed, not by a little but by a lot. We don’t know enough to predict climate behavior, no matter how many ways we try to weigh, count, measure it, and model it. Our theories are uniformly superficial, regardless of consensus, a term which Michael Crichton brilliantly argued is a contradiction in terms. Science does not progress by a process of democratic buy-ins by the scientists whose research grants depend on an unchallenged consensus; it progresses by means of scrupulously practiced scientific method. But our Venn diagramming hero lists Climate Change Denial as a “conspiracy” and omits including Climate Change in his list of Pseudo-Sciences. Go figure.
Back to Intelligent Design as a Venn overlap of Religion and Pseudo-Science. Imagine taking Henry Ford’s Model T and trying to upgrade it to 21st century standards by just adding and replacing parts without carting the chassis itself to the nearest landfill and starting over. Even Darwin had doubts about his theory, declaring that if the fossil record did not produce examples of species transitions that had to have occurred, in accordance with his random mutation model, then his theory would be disproven. Well, the transition fossils have never materialized. No instance of a species that survived thousands of years with sightless blobs of flesh set into a skull that would eventually accidentalize its way to highly focused, full color, swiveling vision. But just look at the superior grin of World-famous Richard Dawkins, who had the balls to write a book called “The Blind Watchmaker.” (I regard that as an eponymous title, by the way, entirely in keeping with the author’s narcissistic delusions of brilliance.)
Want to see how easy it is to disprove Darwinian theory? Look at any documentary about Evolution. Repeatedly, you will be told that this or that species “evolved” this or that physical attribute (in order) to adapt to some critical environmental factor. Cheetahs become blindingly fast, twice as swift as any other big cat (in order) to succeed as solitary hunters. I keep putting “in order” in parentheses because it denotes an intention its omission underplays, which is certainly the intention of Darwin apologists, that is, the intention to make a sale based on the idea of purpose, even though the wrap-up text returns repeatedly to the absurd position that there is no purpose in Evolution, never was, it’s all just a giant long-running accident, so please move along now.
But if you don’t want to watch a bunch of documentaries, all you really need to do is watch this short video:
Some additional facts. You hear a lot about the Great Barrier Reef, and how it is dying, and how it must be the fault of Mankind with his fossil-fueled Climate Change and all, but there are some things they don’t tell you, meaning you have to look them up. Like, the Great Barrier Reef is actually only about 20,000 years old. That’s not a lot of time in evolutionary terms. The first paragraph will tell you that Australia started sprouting a Great Barrier Reef maybe 600,000 years ago. But the breaks just weren’t right. It collapsed under the sea because of, wait for it!, changing water temperatures, the same villain that’s afflicting the current reef. Also, the reef tried making itself a couple of other times less than half a million years ago. Those attempts also failed. Is it possible that gigantic reef archipelagos have their own life cycles and like other living organisms eventually die?
Well, forget all that. The important thing here is to realize that the unique, highly specialized fauna of the Great Barrier Reef are creatures whose random “mutations” seem to be focused not very randomly on camouflaging their bodies from predators and prey. Now pretend you’re a scientific documentarian specializing in the ridicule of Darwin skeptics, and explain to your audience how the smallest vertebrate in the known universe “accidentally” acquired the body chemistry to change his color and skin conformation to match exactly whatever kind of coral he/she is nesting in. Try to believe that he/she is mentally and physically incapable of understanding the concepts of color, skin growths, and the value of camouflage as a survival strategy, given that he/she doesn’t even know it’s alive. Now try to explain to yourself why the idea of accidental mutation is more rationally appealing than the simple and obvious solution of purpose-driven change. The usual Darwinian escape hatch (“Understand, we’re talking millions and millions of years here…) is absent in the case of the Pygmy Seahorse. These are “mutations” which had to have occurred in less than 20,000 years, a trifling moment in Darwinian time.
One of the great scientific breakthroughs (and simultaneous sellouts) was Stephen Wolfram’s very large book “A New Kind of Science.” In it he argues that a great many natural processes exhibit compelling evidence of artificial intelligence, meaning that many natural phenomena are not random per se,but the product of self-writing and self-correcting code. He demonstrates his evidence with innumerable examples which he compares to early computer attempts at coding artificial life. It’s a fascinating read if you’re interested in things like that. My takeaway was that he’s probably right, but he also suffers from Darwin Syndrome. He does exactly what all those Darwinian documentaries do. He ultimately rejects the idea of purpose. He cannot yield up his scientific atheism even on the altar of his own brilliance.
Never mind that he is nakedly showing us a computer creating real organic life while insisting that there is no purposeful consciousness at the keyboard. All right, then. I guarantee you Wolfram is way smarter than Richard Dawkins, though balder and therefore less famous, but Darwin is a humongous trap hardly anyone anywhere can escape from.
I have a wonderful essay, not yet written, called The Problem with Math. Look for it after I’ve posted it on one of my websites. It actually explains the God Problem pretty neatly. And ironically, if I dare say so myself. “Ah,” you will say to yourselves. “You expect us to believe, to have faith in, the existence of a brilliant essay for which there is absolutely NO evidence.” My reply? “Exactimundo.”
The essay does exist. It is written. In my head. Has been there for many of my 67+ years. I use it as a personal resource in other writings, which consistently confirm its consistent points. In other words, which is to say many millions of words, there exists a context for believing that the essay exists, even though you can’t find it at a single Internet address.
You may choose to believe or not to believe that the essay exists. If you’re the scientific sort, you will be inclined to disbelieve, because there is nothing to count, weigh, measure with calipers, or dissect in a laboratory under approved clinical conditions. In still other words, there is no body produced in court to enable a well-intentioned jury to be an objective finder of fact.
What am I even talking about? The casual assignment of Religion (unlike the other categories of our Venn Master, disingenuously — he should have more truthfully called it “Superstition,” to him, admittedly a mere provocative synonym) as across-the-board “Nonsense” is actually the only honest aspect of this, forgive my pun, Trumpery.
Two points before we move on. The use of a Venn Diagram is a deceptive exercise in preemptive propagandizing. His labels around the outside of the diagram are immediately prejudicial. His construction of the lists contained within the diagram use all the tactics employed by Professional, supposedly scientific, Skeptics. We are presented with a seemingly comprehensive set of “nonsense” beliefs that are in fact nothing but a parade of grossly false equivalencies justified by an apparently objective scientific tool used as an appealing context that is, in fact, utterly devoid of context. He nowhere justifies or explains his inclusions. He’s simply demanding acceptance because he’s done the homework(?) every one of his dullard brethren is too lazy to do. Ipso facto, he wins. Anyone who doubts this elegant graphic is a fool.
All of the world’s major religions are “nonsense,” on a par with Truther conspiracies about phantom planes and thermite bombs on 9/11. Indeed, the lists are better proof of what he doesn’t know anything about than anything he’s quite certain he does know about. Which is not much. Like all Professional Skeptics everywhere. They boast about the scientific method and never use it. The embark on every unanswered question with the conviction that any extraordinary claim is, a priori, without merit.
Point 2. He gives himself away with the architecture of his diagram. By giving himself away, I mean he is revealing his own sinister intention, perhaps without realizing it at a conscious level. His diagram is not Venn; it is Sacred Geometry. He is building a five-pointed star, a pentagram often claimed by Satanists but in fact conceived of by Christians and other religious faiths, including peoples from Vikings to the Chinese.
It’s esthetically pleasing but at its core it’s just a hard-hearted lie. The centerpiece he has so much trouble filling in is also Sacred Geometry, a pentagonal symbol that is a mathematical function of the surrounding star. It’s supposed to have meaning. But our Venn master has no meaning and is thus at a loss.
Or, to be more precise, this:
He is therefore using precisely the same kinds of deceptions he would cheerfully ascribe to people who espouse what he considers pseudo-science, quackery, and religion.
In conclusion, needless to say, he has a missing essay of his own and takes no accountability for it. This dumb chart is the sum total of his context. But that’s how we’ve chosen to live our lives in this, the 21st, century. Who really should be occupying this boy’s pentagon of elders? These guys.
Why is it so hard to see the wrong turns the “consensus” makes us take? Think of your mind as a table. Like a good skeptic, you accord yourself faith to those things which fit on the table, if they don’t fit, you just push them off the edge, out of existence.
Here’s how the Professional Skeptic table looks. Room for dinosaurs, apocalyptic fears, Darwinian Evolution, and Science & Technology. Kewl. Anything else? No way, José.
Thing is, their center pentagon still has no meaning. I’m thinking that for an atheist, the Venn rendering should look more like this.
But they think they have values, beliefs, and morals. Which turn out to be reducible to this.
All in all, this lavish Venn diagram is a beautiful example of what Urban Dictionary calls a Self-Eating Watermelon.
P.S. By the way, Satanists DO tend to get the credit for Sacred Geometry (i.e., Heretical Geometry), which like most symbols Satanic is merely stolen Christian imagery. Like their upside down cross. Very original. Their use of geometry is very much the same, namely upside down.
They flip the Spirit star point to the bottom and replace it with matters of material earthiness. Bracketed by the devil horns we all know and love. I’m not accusing Venn boy of anything, mind. If you want to play with his diagram in this bizarre context, feel free. I’m pretty sure he’s not a Satanist but just a not-too-bright garden variety atheist who knows way more than less than nothing.
*Sample Venn Diagram for those who don’t know how they work. This one is simple enough as to require no explanation. What one region overlaps is related to it somehow.
1968 was a series of hammer blows, one pain after another. 1969 was worse, the harrowing that followed. Not just broken bones but a kind of constant gnawing of our insides that ate out of us the core of American character, including our faith, hope, and charity as a people. Nothing in our nation has been the same since that year. We are coarser, lazier of thought, greedier in venal ways that would have appalled our parents. That was 50 years ago.
2018 was likewise a series of hammer blows, most importantly in terms of the body politic, where the root word “polity” finally proved itself an oxymoron if not a joke. The year was dominated by a ramping up of the most concerted attempt to destroy a sitting president by the mere expedients of never ceasing to accuse him, month after month after month, and then formalizing this obsession into an entity unto itself, called an investigation but consisting in reality of the equivalent of a SWAT team breaking into every home, and life, of the prime suspect’s family, friends, associates, and acquaintances, with the usual TV FBI result — no one home.
if 2019 follows the 50 year cycle of repetition, the coming year will be as loud as the continuously escalating liberal media hatred of Richard Nixon and as subtle as the unheralded arrival in this country of AIDS. Events will be not singly catastrophic but continuous, a deliberate and cynical death of a thousand cuts that may very well leave many of us gasping and enervated from loss of energy even to watch what is happening in our country for another day.
Maybe the Fates will be kind and spare us this sapping ordeal. But I fear not. In so many ways, like the children of the Sixties, we have asked for this, participated in it to some degree or at least failed to stand up strongly against it. Which means we likely deserve what we have brought upon ourselves.
Not 1968, awful as that was, but 1969, when with few notable exceptions the body of American life so scarred by recent events proceeded to shed much of its skin and begin creating a new identity with little or no regard for or allegiance to the past.
—It ‘s a time of many beginnings: Wendy’s, Long John Silver’s, Arthur Treacher’s, Walmart, Scooby Doo, the Brady Bunch, Sesame Street, Monty Python, Led Zeppelin, the supersonic Concorde, the jumbo jet 747, the first X rated film to win an Oscar, new movie superstars like Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, and Jon Voight, the election of Golda Meir as Israel’s first female premier, the attainment of power by Yassir Arafat and Muhammar Khaddafi, early chain rattlings inside Iran…
—As well as endings galore: The Beatles breakup, the death of President and WWII Supreme Allied Commander Eisenhower, the death of Ho ChinMinh, the death of Mary Jo Kopechnemand Kennedy dreams of another presidency, the death of Brian Jones, founding member of The Rolling Stones, Jack Kerouac, Judy Garland, Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, the LaBiancas, Mies van der Rohe, Jeffrey Hunter, John L. Lewis, Rocky Marciano, Robert Taylor, Max Eastman, Eric Portman, Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., and many more…
—And most signicantly, perhaps, ominous hints of the new life-changing American world awaiting us in every sphere: the mud and libertinism of Woodstock, the Hell’s Angels killing a fan at Altamont (“the end of the sixties” it was called), the beginning of the draft lottery system, the National Guard arresting student protesters in North Dakota, the first U.S. case and death in the AIDS crisis, the beginning of the gay rights movement, the birth of rights groups for Native Americans and their seizure and occupation of Alcatraz Island, the first senate refusal to confirm a SCOTUS nominee since 1930, the arrest for indecent exposure onstage by Doors frontman Jim Morrison, the trial, conviction and public anguish over Lt.. Calley and the My Lai Massacre, the unprecedented murder spree of Charles Manson’s hippie-girl murder cult, the trials and convictions of James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan, the nationwide Vietnam War Moratorium by ordinary citizens, black players protesting their head coach by wearing black armbands to his office, on the heels of an oil spill the birth of an extreme ecology movement as a political force that spawned Earth Day, the violent occupation of university buildings by students at Harvard, the Weathermen bombings, the controversial shootings of Black Panthers in Chicago, the arrival of Gloria Steinem as a feminist force standing on the shoulders of the Black Power Movement, the specification of the Unix Operating System, the baby steps of Internet precursor ARPA, invention of the digital camera chip that will lead all the way to smartphones, and more of course…
It’s all here, the elevation of youth over experience, the blossoming of victim-oriented rights groups, recurrence of the age old curse of deadly physical violence in American politics, the many byproducts of drugs and untrammeled promiscuity, and the media celebration of a runaway counterculture that in a trice becomes THE Culture. The most surprising thing today might be realizing how hard it is to remember a time when all this wasn’t so. It just is that way now.
This nation and much of the rest of the world would never be the same after 1969. This is the furniture of life many of our children don’t know never existed before. More than any other year, this is the one that did the most to shape how they live now and what they still have to face in their own lives. What do you tell them about the past? There is a bit of the good old American sporting life in here if you orvthey care anymore. Willie Mays hitting his 600th career home run. The Amazing Mets winning the World Series. The Jets shocking the Colts in Super Bowl III. Amid the reliable punctuation of Ohio State winning another national collegiate football championship. And, obviously, Apollo 11 landing on the moon. If your kids still believe in the Apollo triumph. Or in the moon.
Here’s the 1969 timeline. In Part 4, we’ll talk about the year that started this line of thought. Next year. 2019. Think about it till then. Think in particular of the speed of the changes represented here. From Woodstock Nation to murder at the Stones Gimme Shelter concert at Altamont in less than six months. How fast big bad breakthroughs in behavior can come.
Click graphic for source.
THE 1969 TIMELINE, JANUARY THROUGH DECEMBER
Read it at your leisure, but please read it.
JANUARY
January 1 – Ohio State defeats USC in the Rose Bowl to win the national college football championship for the 1968 season.
January 5 –
Ariana Afghan Airlines Flight 701 crashes into a house on its approach to London’s Gatwick Airport, killing 50 of the 62 people on board and two of the home’s occupants.
January 12 —
Led Zeppelin, the first Led Zeppelin album, is released in the United States.
Martial law is declared in Madrid, as the University is closed and over 300 students are arrested.
American football: The New York Jets upset the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III, 16-7. Joe Namath is the MVP of the game.
January 14 —
An explosion aboard the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise near Hawaii kills 27 and injures 314.
The Soviet Union launches Soyuz 4.
January 15 – The Soviet Union launches Soyuz 5, which docks with Soyuz 4 for a transfer of crew.
January 16 –
Two cosmonauts transfer from Soyuz 5 to Soyuz 4 via a spacewalk while the two craft are docked together, the first time such a transfer takes place. The two spacecraft undock and return to Earth two days later.
Student Jan Palach sets himself on fire in Prague’s Wenceslas Square to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia; 3 days later he dies.
January 20 – Richard Nixon is sworn in as the 37th President of the United States.
January 22 – An assassination attempt is carried out on Leonid Brezhnev by deserter Viktor Ilyin. One person is killed, several are injured. Brezhnev escaped unharmed.
January 26 – Elvis Presley steps into American Studios in Memphis, Tennessee… beginning the recording of… landmark comeback sessions for [albums including the songs] “Suspicious Minds”, “In the Ghetto”, and “Kentucky Rain”.
January 28 – 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill: A blowout on Union Oil’s Platform A spills 80,000 to 100,000 barrels of crude oil into a channel and onto the beaches of Santa Barbara County in Southern California; on February 5 the oil spill closes Santa Barbara’s harbor. The incident will inspire Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson [and Ira Einhorn] to organize the first Earth Day in 1970.
January 31 – The Beatles give their last public performance, of several tracks on the roof of Apple Records, London (featured in Let It Be (1970 film)).
FEBRUARY
February 4 – In Cairo, Yasser Arafat is elected Palestine Liberation Organization leader at the Palestinian National Congress.
February 5 – The controversial television show Turn-On premieres on the ABC network in the United States and is canceled after one episode following protests by viewers and ABC affiliate stations.
February 8 — After 147 years, the last weekly issue of The Saturday Evening Post is published. The magazine is later resurrected, briefly, as a monthly magazine.
February 9 – The Boeing 747 “jumbo jet” is flown for the first time, taking off from the Boeing airfield at Everett, Washington.
February 13 – Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) terrorists bomb the Montreal Stock Exchange.
February 14 – Pope Paul VI issues Mysterii Paschalis, a motu proprio, deleting many names from the Roman calendar of saints (including Valentine, who was celebrated on this day).
February 17 – Aquanaut Berry L. Cannon dies of carbon dioxide poisoning while attempting to repair the SEALAB III habitat off San Clemente Island, California.
February 24
The Mariner 6 Mars probe is launched from the United States.
Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District: The Supreme Court of the United States rules that the First Amendment to the United States Constitution applies to public schools.
MARCH
March 2 — In Toulouse, France the first Concorde test flight is conducted.
Soviet and Chinese forces clash at a border outpost on the Ussuri River.
March 3 —
Apollo program: NASA launches Apollo 9 (James McDivitt, David Scott, Rusty Schweickart) to test the lunar module.
In a Los Angeles court, Sirhan Sirhan admits that he killed presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy.
The United States Navy establishes the Navy Fighter Weapons School (also known as Top Gun) at Naval Air Station Miramar.
March 4 – Arrest warrants are issued by a Florida court for Jim Morrison on charges of indecent exposure during a Doors concert three days earlier.
March 10 —
In Memphis, Tennessee, James Earl Ray pleads guilty to assassinating Martin Luther King Jr. (he later retracts his guilty plea).
The novel The Godfather by Mario Puzo is first distributed to booksellers by the publisher G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
March 13 – Apollo program: Apollo 9 returns safely to Earth after testing the Lunar Module.
March 17 —
Golda Meir becomes the first female prime minister of Israel.
March 18 – Operation Breakfast, the covert bombing of Cambodia by U.S. planes, begins.
March 19 —
John Lennon and Yoko Ono are married at Gibraltar, and proceed to their honeymoon “Bed-In” for peace in Amsterdam.
March 28 – Pope Paul VI increases the number of Roman Catholic cardinals by one-third, from 101 to 134.
March 30 – The body of former United States General and President Dwight D. Eisenhower is brought by caisson to the United States Capitol to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda; Eisenhower had died two days earlier, after a long illness, in the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Washington, D.C.
APRIL
April 1 – The Hawker Siddeley Harrier [vertical takeoff and landing] enters service with the Royal Air Force.
April 4 – Dr. Denton Cooley implants the first temporary artificial heart.
April 8 – The Montreal Expos debut as Major League Baseball’s first team outside the United States.
April 9 —
The Harvard University Administration Building is seized by close to 300 students, mostly members of the Students for a Democratic Society. Before the takeover ends, 45 will be injured and 184 arrested.
April 15 – The EC-121 shootdown incident: North Korea shoots down the aircraft over the Sea of Japan, killing all 31 on board.
April 20 —
British troops arrive in Northern Ireland to reinforce the Royal Ulster Constabulary.
A grassroots movement of Berkeley community members seizes an empty lot owned by the University of California, to begin the formation of “People’s Park”.
April 28 – Charles de Gaulle steps down as president of France after suffering defeat in a referendum the day before.
MAY
May 10 — Zip to Zap, a gathering of more than 2,000 people students and young adults at the remote town of at Zap, North Dakota, ends with the dispersal and eviction of the revelers by the North Dakota National Guard.
The Battle of Dong Ap Bia, also known as Hamburger Hill, begins during the Vietnam War.
May 15 – An American teenager known as ‘Robert R.’ dies in St. Louis, Missouri, of a baffling medical condition. In 1984 it will be identified as the earliest confirmed case of HIV/AIDS in North America.
May 16 – Venera program: Venera 5, a Soviet spaceprobe, lands on Venus.
May 17 – Venera program: Soviet probe Venera 6 begins to descend into Venus’s atmosphere, sending back atmospheric data before being crushed by pressure.
May 18 – Apollo program: Apollo 10 (Tom Stafford, Gene Cernan, John Young) is launched as a full rehearsal for the Moon landing, but stops 15 kilometers short of actually reaching the lunar surface.
May 20 – United States National Guard helicopters spray skin-stinging powder on anti-war protesters in California.
May 22 – Apollo program: Apollo 10’s lunar module flies to within 15,400 m of the Moon’s surface.
May 25 – Midnight Cowboy, an X-rated, Oscar-winning John Schlesinger film, is released.
May 26 — Apollo program: Apollo 10 returns to Earth, after a successful 8-day test of all the components needed for the upcoming first manned Moon landing.
May 26–June 2 – John Lennon and Yoko Ono conduct their second Bed-In. The follow-up to the Amsterdam event is held at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, Quebec. Lennon composes and records the song Give Peace a Chance during the Bed-In.
JUNE
June 3 – While operating at sea on SEATO maneuvers, the Australian aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne accidentally rams and slices into the American destroyer USS Frank E. Evans in the South China Sea, killing 74 American seamen.
June 5 – An international communist conference begins in Moscow.
June 7 – The rock group Blind Faith plays its first gig in front of 100,000 people in London’s Hyde Park.
June 8 – Francisco Franco orders the closing of the Gibraltar–Spain border and communications between Gibraltar and Spain in response to the 1967 Gibraltar sovereignty referendum.
June 8 – U.S. President Richard Nixon and South Vietnamese President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu meet at Midway Island. Nixon announces that 25,000 U.S. troops will be withdrawn by September.
June 15 – Georges Pompidou is elected President of France.
June 18–22 – The National Convention of the Students for a Democratic Society, held in Chicago, collapses, and the Weatherman faction seizes control of the SDS National Office. Thereafter, any activity run from the National Office or bearing the name of SDS is Weatherman-controlled.
June 22 —The Cuyahoga River fire helps spur an avalanche of water pollution control activities resulting in the Clean Water Act, Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement and the creation of the federal Environmental Protection Agency.
Judy Garland dies of a drug overdose in her London home.
June 23 – Warren E. Burger is sworn in as Chief Justice of the United States by retiring Chief Justice Earl Warren.
June 24 – The United Kingdom and Rhodesia sever diplomatic ties, after Rhodesian constitutional referendum.
June 28 – The Stonewall riots in New York City mark the start of the modern gay rights movement in the U.S.
JULY
July 1 – Charles, Prince of Wales, is invested with his title at Caernarfon.
July 3 – Brian Jones, musician and founder of The Rolling Stones, drowns in his swimming pool at his home in Sussex, England.
July 7 – French is made equal to English throughout the Canadian national government.
July 8 – Vietnam War: The very first U.S. troop withdrawals are made.
July 14 — The Act of Free Choice commences in Merauke, West Iran.
The United States’ $500, $1,000, $5,000 and $10,000 bills are officially withdrawn from circulation.
July 16 – Apollo program: Apollo 11 (Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins) lifts off toward the first landing on the Moon.
July 18 – Chappaquiddick incident – Edward M. Kennedy drives off a bridge on his way home from a party on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts. Mary Jo Kopechne, a former campaign aide to his brother, dies in the early morning hours of July 19 in the submerged car.
July 20 – Apollo program: The lunar module Eagle/Apollo 11 lands on the lunar surface. An estimated 500 million people worldwide watch in awe as Neil Armstrong takes his historic first steps on the Moon at 10:56 pm ET (02:56 UTC July 21), the largest television audience for a live broadcast at that time.[8][9]
July 22 – Spanish dictator and head of state Francisco Franco appoints Prince Juan Carlos his successor.
July 24 — The Apollo 11 astronauts return from the first successful Moon landing, and are placed in biological isolation for several days, on the chance they may have brought back lunar germs. The airless lunar environment is later determined to preclude microscopic life.
July 25 – Vietnam War: U.S. President Richard Nixon declares the Nixon Doctrine, stating that the United States now expects its Asian allies to take care of their own military defense. This starts the “Vietnamization” of the war.
July 26 – The New York Chapter of the Young Lords is founded.
July 30 – Vietnam War: U.S. President Richard Nixon makes an unscheduled visit to South Vietnam, meeting with President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu and U.S. military commanders.
AUGUST
August 4 – Vietnam War: At the apartment of French intermediary Jean Sainteny in Paris, U.S. representative Henry Kissinger and North Vietnamese representative Xuan Thuy begin secret peace negotiations. They eventually fail since both sides cannot agree to any terms.
August 8 — The Beatles at 11:30 have photographer Iain Macmillan take their photo on a zebra crossing on Abbey Road.
August 9 — Members of the Manson Family invade the home of actress Sharon Tate and her husband Roman Polanski in Los Angeles. The followers kill Tate (who was 8 months pregnant), and her friends: Folgers coffee heiress Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, and Hollywood hairstylist Jay Sebring. Also killed is Steven Parent, leaving from a visit to the Polanski’s caretaker. More than 100 stab wounds are found on the victims, except for Parent, who had been shot almost as soon as the Manson Family entered the property.
August 10 – The Manson Family kills Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, wealthy Los Angeles businessman and his wife.
August 13 – Serious border clashes occur between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China.
August 14 – British troops are deployed in Northern Ireland following the three-day Battle of the Bogside.
August 15–18 – The Woodstock Festival is held in upstate New York, featuring some of the top rock musicians of the era. [Event came to be known as Woodstock Nation]
August 17 – Category 5 Hurricane Camille, the most powerful tropical cyclonic system at landfall in history, hits the Mississippi coast, killing 248 people and causing US$1.5 billion in damage (1969 dollars).
August 21 — Strong violence on demonstration in Prague and Brno, Czechoslovakia. Military force contra citizens. ‘Prague Spring’ finally beaten.
August 29 – A Trans World Airlines flight from Rome to Tel Aviv is hijacked and diverted to Syria.
SEPTEMBER
September 1 – 1969 Libyan coup d’état: A bloodless coup in Libya ousts King Idris, and brings Colonel Muammar Gaddafi to power.
September 2 — The first automatic teller machine in the United States is installed in Rockville Centre, New York.
Ho Chi Minh, former president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, dies.
September 5 – Lieutenant William Calley is charged with six counts of premeditated murder, for the 1968 My Lai Massacre deaths of 109 Vietnamese civilians in My Lai, Vietnam.
September 9 – Allegheny Airlines Flight 853 DC-9 collides in flight with a Piper PA-28, and crashes near Fairland, Indiana, killing all 83 persons in both aircraft.
September 13 – Scooby-Doo airs its first episode on the CBS network in the United States.
September 14 – The US Selective Service selects September 14 as the First Draft Lottery date.
September 20 — At a meeting between The Beatles (minus George Harrison) and business manager Allen Klein, John Lennon announces his intention to quit the group.
The very last theatrical Warner Bros. cartoon is released: the Merrie Melodies short Injun Trouble.
September 22 – San Francisco Giant Willie Mays becomes the first player since Babe Ruth to hit 600 career home runs.
September 22–25 – An Islamic conference in Rabat, Morocco, following the al-Aqsa Mosque fire (August 21), condemns the Israeli claim of ownership of Jerusalem.
September 23 — China carries out an underground nuclear bomb test.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (directed by George Roy Hill and starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford) opens to limited release in the United States.
September 24 – The Chicago Eight trial begins in Chicago, Illinois.
September 25 – The Organisation of the Islamic Conference is founded.
September 26 —‘The Beatles release their Abbey Road album which is an enormous commercial success and, although receiving mixed reviews at this time, comes to be viewed by many as the group’s best.
The Brady Bunch is broadcast for the first time on ABC.
OCTOBER
October 1 —‘In Sweden, Olof Palme is elected Leader of the Social Democratic Worker’s Party, replacing Tage Erlander as Prime Minister on October 14.
The Beijing Subway begins operation.
October 2 – A 1.2 megaton thermonuclear device is tested at Amchitka Island, Alaska. This test is code-named Project Milrow, the 11th test of the Operation Mandrel 1969–1970 underground nuclear test series. This test is known as a “calibration shot” to test if the island is fit for larger underground nuclear detonations.
October 5 — Monty Python’s Flying Circus first airs on BBC One.
October 9–12 – ‘Days of Rage’: In Chicago, the United States National Guard is called in to control demonstrations involving the radical Weathermen, in connection with the “Chicago Eight” Trial.
October 11–16 – The New York Mets defeat the Baltimore Orioles four games to one in one of the greatest World Series upsets in baseball history.
October 15 — Vietnam War: Hundreds of thousands of people take part in Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam demonstrations across the United States.
October 17 — Willard S. Boyle and George Smith invent the CCD at Bell Laboratories (30 years later, this technology is widely used in digital cameras).
Fourteen black athletes are kicked off the University of Wyoming football team for wearing black armbands into their coach’s office.
October 22 – Led Zeppelin release Led Zeppelin II to critical acclaim and commercial success.
October 29 – The first message is sent over ARPANET, the forerunner of the internet.
October 31 — Wal-Mart incorporates as Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.
NOVEMBER
November 3 — Vietnam War: U.S. President Richard Nixon addresses the nation on television and radio, asking the “silent majority” to join him in solidarity with the Vietnam War effort, and to support his policies. Vice President Spiro Agnew denounces the President’s critics as ‘an effete corps of impudent snobs’ and ‘nattering nabobs of negativism’.
November 7 – Pink Floyd release their Ummagumma album.
November 9 – A group of American Indians, led by Richard Oakes, seizes Alcatraz Island for 19 months, inspiring a wave of renewed Indian pride and government reform.
November 10 – Sesame Street aired its first episode on the NET network.
November 12 – Vietnam War – My Lai Massacre: Independent investigative journalist Seymour Hersh breaks the My Lai story.
November 14 — Apollo program: NASA launches Apollo 12 (Pete Conrad, Richard Gordon, Alan Bean), the second manned mission to the Moon.
The SS United States, the last active United States Lines passenger ship, is withdrawn from service.
November 15 — Cold War: The Soviet submarine K-19 collides with the American submarine USS Gato in the Barents Sea.
Vietnam War: In Washington, D.C., 250,000–500,000 protesters stage a peaceful demonstration against the war, including a symbolic “March Against Death”.
Dave Thomas opens his first restaurant in a former steakhouse in downtown Columbus, Ohio. He names the chain Wendy’s after his 8-year-old daughter, Melinda Lou (nicknamed “Wendy” by her siblings).
November 17 – Cold War: Negotiators from the Soviet Union and the United States meet in Helsinki, to begin the SALT I negotiations aimed at limiting the number of strategic weapons on both sides.
November 19 — Apollo program: Apollo 12 astronauts Charles Conrad and Alan Bean land at Oceanus Procellarum (“Ocean of Storms”), becoming the third and fourth humans to walk on the Moon.
Soccer great Pelé scores his 1,000th goal.
November 20 — Vietnam War: The Plain Dealer publishes explicit photographs of dead villagers from the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam.
Richard Oakes returns with 90 followers and offers to buy Alcatraz for $24 (he leaves the island January 1970).
November 21 — U.S. President Richard Nixon and Japanese Premier Eisaku Satō agree in Washington, D.C. to the return of Okinawa to Japanese control in 1972. Under the terms of the agreement, the U.S. retains rights to military bases on the island, but they must be nuclear-free.
The first ARPANET link is established (the progenitor of the global Internet).
The United States Senate votes down the Supreme Court nomination of Clement Haynsworth, the first such rejection since 1930.
November 22 – College Football: Michigan ends Ohio State’s 22-game winning streak with a 24-12 upset at Ann Arbor, denying the Buckeyes their second consecutive national championship.
November 24 – Apollo program: The Apollo 12 spacecraft splashes down safely in the Pacific Ocean, ending the second manned mission to the Moon.
November 25 – John Lennon returns his MBE medal to protest the British government’s involvement in the Nigerian Civil War.
DECEMBER
December 1 – Vietnam War: The first draft lottery in the United States is held since World War II (on January 4, 1970, The New York Times will run a long article, “Statisticians Charge Draft Lottery Was Not Random”).
December 2 – The Boeing 747 jumbo jet makes its first passenger flight. It carries 191 people, most of them reporters and photographers, from Seattle, to New York City.
December 4 – Black Panther Party members Fred Hampton and Mark Clark are shot dead in their sleep during a raid by 14 Chicago police officers.
December 5 – The Rolling Stones album Let It Bleed is released.
December 6 — The Altamont Free Concert is held at the Altamont Speedway in northern California. Hosted by The Rolling Stones, it is an attempt at a “Woodstock West” and is best known for the uproar of violence that occurred. It is viewed by many as the “end of the sixties.”
December 7 — The animated Rankin Bass Christmas special Frosty the Snowman premiers on CBS.
December 24 — Charles Manson is allowed to defend himself at the Tate-LaBianca murder trial.
The oil company Phillips Petroleum made the first oil discovery in the Norwegian sector of North Sea.
December 27 – The Liberal Democratic Party wins 47.6% of the votes in the Japanese general election, 1969. Future prime ministers Yoshirō Mori and Tsutomu Hata and future kingmaker Ichirō Ozawa are elected for the first time.
December 28 – The Young Lords take over the First Spanish Methodist Church in East Harlem.
DATE UNKNOWN
Summer – Invention of Unix under the potential name “Unics” (after Multics).[11]
Fall – International Convention on Civil Liability for Oil Pollution Damage, a maritime treaty, is adopted.
The first strain of the AIDS virus (HIV) migrates to the United States via Haiti.[12]
Women are allowed membership in the Future Farmers of America (the later National FFA Organization).
Long John Silver’s restaurant chain opens its first store in Lexington, Kentucky.
Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips is founded by S. Robert Davis and Dave Thomas and its first location in Columbus, Ohio opens for business.
Gloria Steinem publishes first major article on Women’s Rights, “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation.”
CHAPTER 153
11 …their handsome young president was dead,
12 And maybe you really couldn’t get even for a thing like that,
13 Even if you were a Yank,
14 Because maybe not even Yanks can do everything.
15 Shammadamma..
CHAPTER 154
And so, all of a sudden, it seemed like maybe the Yanks weren’t quite as youthful anymore,
2 Or as confident,
3 Or as hopeful,
4 Or as all-powerful as they had thought,
5 Which is usually the first sign that a Chosen Nation isn’t quite as Chosen as it used to be,
6 And is maybe getting a little tired,
7 And more than a little confused,
8 And in need of some new ideas about how to live in a world that’s a lot more complicated than it looks…”
From The Book of Damn Yankees, The Boomer Bible
November 22, 1963. Lyndon Johnson takes the Oath of Office on Air Force One, flanked by his wife Lady Bird and Jackie Kennedy, still wearing her bloodstained suit. His is to be a bloodstained presidency, and he does not escape the stains even at a personal level. From his earliest moments in office there is an undercurrent, rarely voiced in public but often in private, of suspicion that Johnson may have had something to do with what happened in Dallas. He was from Texas, where the assassination occurred. He had a history with both Kennedy brothers, a history of enmity, and in 1960 he had lost a bitter fight for the presidential nomination which he lost, in his view, to Kennedy money and northeastern aristocrats of the Democrat Party. The Vice Presidency had been an insulting consolation prize for a true “Lion of the Senate” whose legislative accomplishments outweighed, even today, the sum total of those achieved by senators named Kennedy. An inauspicious beginning and an omen of The Descent to come.
He began bravely enough, with high ambitions.
The old economic truism is that a society’s chief mission is to allocate resources between “guns and butter.” Without necessarily meaning to, Johnson very early in his presidency decided to spend all the nation’s government resources on both.
He listened to his inherited JFK brain trust about choosing to continue amping up the U.S. presence in Vietnam to deter the global ambitions of Soviet Communism. He listened to his own political instincts on butter, launching an incredibly grand and expensive federal program to build a “Great Society” and use government largesse to end poverty in America forever. That much butter also helps distract public attention from what’s beginning to look like a faintly sinister series of increasingly frequent foreign wars. Four in less than 50 years: World War I, World War II, Korea, and now Vietnam. Kennedy had started it and had seemed to be vacillating toward the end about whether to continue and had actually ordered 1,000 American advisers home in late 1963. Still in 1963, John immediately reversed that order and convened his foreign policy team. The big man in Johnson, the swaggering Texan, came to agree with McNamara and Rusk that the best way to continue was to win big in Vietnam.
Johnson’s presidency was doomed from this moment on. He won his election to inherited presidency with a single TV ad that ran once and went globally viral before there was internet. The ad showed a little girl playing in a field of flowers. Then a hydrogen bomb explodes, freezing frame on the little girl, and to wind things up there’s a modest printed suggestion to vote for LBJ. The message was clear. Johnson’s rival, Goldwater, wanted to face down the Russians head to head with an ever bigger nuclear arsenal. Johnson would defeat the commies too, but not by going directly toe to toe with the Russians. Much better to snuff out the little wars in client states they use to sap American military resources and popular will. Johnson’s mistake? The Russian strategy was dead on in Vietnam. The military resource issue was actually less important than the part about popular will, which never occurred to the brain trust or the president until the situation got very much worse.
Regular troops fighting guerillas on their home turf is both a bad military circumstance and a rotten public relations opportunity. While the U.S. was never defeated in a military engagement with North Vietnamese troops and killed very large numbers of both their regular troops and the traitor Vietnam Congress in the south, there were no flashy victories for the headlines, which made the press suspicious, then hostile. Johnson’s response was to keep sending in more troops, drafting hundreds of thousands into the Army and even (gasp) into the Marines, as young people saw nothing for themselves out of the war but coming home in body bags.
The Anti-War Movement started quite early on, but its shrewdest leaders were well placed to have a major impact. They were safe inside universities. They still had their II-S student deferments, which they used to slide out of college into graduate school, where they initiated their stranglehold on the politics of humanities and social science departments while they built capable communist-style organizations made of cells and moles to have an outsize impact.
“Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” The constant refrain Lyndon Johnson had to live with, on the road and even outside the White House. The TV was filled with video of these chants, as well as battlefield footage of Vietnam, which did not show battles so much as tired, damp troops slogging their way through rain-soaked jungles. There were also videos of atrocities, monks burning themselves alive in protest and civilian children burning with U.S. napalm. Walter Cronkite could only shake his head. All he had done since Tet.
Popular support for the war eroded very significantly in 1965 and 1966, as not just academics and professors took up the fight. Civilians didn’t have time available radical students did, but they had numbers and word of mouth and increasing conviction. After the Tet Offensive, mild-mannered poet and U.S. Senator Eugene McCarthy (D) threw his hat into the ring to run against the president. The New Hampshire primary was held on March 12, 1968. Johnson won hardly convincingly against an opponent as obviously symbolic as McCarthy.
The president could not attack McCarthy and he could not yield on Vietnam, whose dollar costs had broken the budget without his acknowledgment and whose human costs he could only increase by his warmaking strategy. He was trapped. He pondered peace talks, but it was already too late for that to succeed, short of announcing total American withdrawal, which he could not do.
He therefore announced he wasn’t running for re-election on March 31, 1968. But he was still the president and the nation he presided over was falling apart. The radicals gave him no quarter and increased their efforts to compound their victories and drive the outcome of the nomination process.
Johnson had only the FBI to fight them with. They were totally unequipped to deal with the new breed of national enemy arrayed against them. They wire-tapped Martin Luther King but were seemingly unable to prevent his assassination in April. Which only compounded his domestic woes. An ambitious new Civil Rights bill had been proposed early in 1964, but it died in Congress, traded for the Kennedy tax cuts Johnson also could not do, though the war had spent the increased revenues, and he had been lying when he told them the money was being spent on the Great Society. Money was being spent on social programs all right but not like what was being spent on the war. There were race riots in Los Angeles over perceived inequities in spending and law enforcement. And all Johnson had to fall back on was the war, the war, and the war.
He talked about peace talks, and Robert Kennedy leaped into the race after New Hampshire, confident of displacing McCarthy. Then RFK was assassinated in June. Hubert Humphrey, LBJ’s Vice President, was pressed into service to uphold the honor of the administration and forestall its abject failure at the polls. Humphrey, a politician’s politician, believed strongly in both sides of the war issue. He supported LBJ’s policies 100 percent and he was also 100 percent for efforts to find an early, honorable way of ending the war.
Then came the Democratic Convention. Year by year, month by month the Johnson Descent went on like a downhill dirge. The Chicago riots were by comparison an explosion of rage and a brand of political animus and heedless violence the American public had never seen. These were children who were throwing Molotov cocktails and bags of their own excrement at cops equally enraged. Inside the Convention Hall, the Democrat Party leaders looked like hostages. The president did not attend.
Various other things happened on up to the election. The country was in shock, angry at everyone. The president was in a state of torpor, like Napoleon sitting catatonically on his log at Waterloo while the Prussians stormed to victory.
Johnson’s tragic flaw? Failure to admit and correct massive errors. He feared the suspicions of his relations with the Kennedys, so he kept the Kennedy team largely in place and followed their advice before he could learn that they were disastrously wrong about Vietnam. He kept McNamara and Rusk, who hated and looked down on him. He kept Robert Kennedy who hated and betrayed him as he had in the past. LBJ did in fact learn that the war had ceased to be a rational issue and was unwinnable in the context of public and press opposition. Yet he persisted in his error at tremendous national and personal cost. The failure to admit catastrophic error is not a uniquely American flaw, but it is American, ingrained in us as is our refusal to surrender against great odds. Johnson had elements of greatness, but that’s why his catastrophe when it came was so devastating, with such incredibly long term aftereffects. One must feel sad for him. But it’s near impossible to forgive him.
We can leave him here for now.
But there is one last formal definition that matters to our story. The Aristotelian Descent ends with something called The Catastrophe. This is when all the bad stuff that has been building against the tragic hero slams down on him with a finality he cannot escape. The Chicago riots were not Johnson’s Catastrophe. They were the nation’s Catastrophe. They were mad at Johnson, but they were also mad at SDS, the Chicago cops, Mayor Dailey who ordered the protester beatdown, and Hubert Humphrey who was the Dem candidate and looked like an ad for Eunuch Suitings by Brook Brothers.
Johnson’s Catastrophe was still to come. After the election of Richard Nixon. After New Year’s Eve. His Catastrophe WAS the New Year. All of it. 1969. Which we will now take a close look at. It constitutes Johnson’s presidential legacy, one which we are still paying for. It may never be undone.
You have to know some history, meaning years and dates and things, to realize that time is not a march of progress but a great wheel that turns eternally. What has happened before repeats, never exactly but with a regularity of echoes, resonances, and direct imitations, whether the imitators are aware of their mimicry or not. As a result, there are anniversaries that stand out even in our archaic counting conventions, because those conventions are not arbitrary but rooted in real contexts such as human life spans and the inevitability of fading memories as generations pass. What is lost to consciousness in the process is not total but it is substantial. Most importantly, the memory that remains is like a photograph of an old photograph of the front pages of newspapers. The vividness of personal recollection, of hard lessons learned, bleeds away and leaves but a husk behind. What remains is the yellowed headlines written by the anonymous, to us, individuals who wrote them and took the photographs inside the photographed newspaper our distant camera is recording.
As a people we make an official attempt to remember the important things that happened 100 years ago, 50 years ago, 20 years ago, and sometimes even 10 years ago. Every year is thus linked to its own anniversaries of the past. 2013 was the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination and 2013 seemed briefly more weighty for that connection. We usually interpret the connections, the resonances, in ways meaningful to our own individual perspectives. In 2013 America’s first black president was in office; we must have made progress. In 2013, high school graduates would be hard put to remember anything specific about JFK except that he was assassinated; this looks like regress. And so it goes. But that 50th anniversary, like many others, is important nevertheless. It invites comparisons on many levels, whether we accept the invitation or not.
We’re approaching the end of another important anniversary year right now. It was exactly 100 years ago that the United States rescued Europe from the costliest war in its history with a year of stunning victories in a conflict that had produced nothing but millions of dead on all sides. It was 75 years ago that America began to turn the tide against Nazi Germany in World War II with its first boots on the ground in Europe, the invasion of Italy. And it was 50 years ago that another war became the central and ultimately deciding issue in the costliest presidential campaign in American history. The year was 1968.
If you’re less than 50 years old right now, you were not born in 1968. You may not know to a certainty — and definitely have no personal recollection — that this was the year in which 1) the U.S. military victory in Vietnam against the communist Tet Offensive was transformed into a humiliating defeat by the coverage of the American press, turning a majority of the broader population permanently against that war, 2) Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis TN, 3) the New Left was officially born in presidential politics with the campaign of Eugene McCarthy, running very simply (and pacifically) “against the Vietnam War,” 4) Robert Kennedy, also running against a war his brother had started, was assassinated as he campaigned for the Democratic nomination, 5) student-led riots during the Democratic National Convention set the seal on the Marxist-inspired use of violence against “the fascist pigs” to achieve political ends in what SDS and other university-bred groups called The Revolution, 6) Richard Nixon defeated Lyndon Johnson’s sitting Vice President Hubert Humphrey to become the 37th President of the United States with his promise to end the war. Hear, see anything today that links 2018 to 1968 apart from the number 50?
The facts alone demonstrate that 1968 was an incredibly traumatic year in American history. But its events did not occur in a vacuum. We spoke of the great wheel of time, and of course there are wheels within wheels (and within them too). We also mentioned the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In fact, 1963 and 1968 are part of a larger story, one we might be able to understand in classical yet intensely human terms.
It was the great Greek philosopher Aristotle who laid out the formal rules for the dramatic form called tragedy. A great man must be destroyed by a fatal flaw, be it his own destiny or a single unchangeable character trait or both, since one can regard both as either. Aristotle defined two types of dramatic tragedy, both to transpire in five acts, with all the physical action taking place offstage, leaving us for the most part alone with the figure of “the tragic hero.” The complex tragedy is the one we’re most familiar with as a culture, since it’s one of Hollywood’s favorite forms, from Citizen Kane to Scarface. We watch the rise and then, after a turning point of some kind, “The Descent” of a man immensely talented for good or ill. Oedipus Rex by Sophocles was the example Aristotle uses as his archetype. Oedipus rises to the throne, marries his mother, and then is brought down to utter ruin by Fate. We’ve seen variations of this plot a hundred times on the silver screen and know its devices well. Portents, glimpses of the flaw working its way to the surface, then the fury of resistance against the inevitable. We’re used to these too.
But there is a second kind of tragedy Aristotle called the Simple Tragedy. Here, the turning point that sets the destruction in motion does not occur in the middle, but at the beginning. Aristotle’s archetype for this form was the play Antigone, also written by Sophocles. Creon, the King of Thebes, has defeated an attempt to overthrow Thebes by one of the brothers of Antigone, herself a royal personage, is the daughter of Oedipus, and becomes the instrument of Creon’s downfall. Creon is a great man, a hero who has defeated the army of Polynices, who died in the war he started. But at the beginning of the play, Creon has just ordered that the remains of Polynices be denied religious burial and scattered in the desert with not even a marker by which he might be found. Antigone rises against Creon, demanding he act on his conscience in obedience to Greek custom. Creon refuses her. His destruction is essentially a linear descent to his final end.
We’ve seen a presidential version of the Simple Tragedy before, though its creators may not have been aware that’s what they were making. In “simplest” terms, All the President’s Men was not the romantic triumph of Woodward and Bernstein but the tragedy of Richard Nixon, beginning with the turning point of an off-camera burglary and ending with his loss of the Presidency and his profound disgrace. Not 1968 to 1974, but 1972 to 1974. In Aristotelian terms, Redford and Hoffman may have had more lines, but they were mere devices, foils employed to destroy a man much greater and more significant than they.
Now, in more specifically historical terms, we can understand the period from the assassination of JFK through to the bitter end of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency and its aftermath as the Simple Tragedy of LBJ. Despite all the twists and turns of fortune, the gyrations of a cast ranging from stars to bit players, the spectacular special FX, and the many intense subplots, this epochal period of our history is the story of Lyndon Baines Johnson. Why should we regard it in this way? Because it simplifies and illuminates and organizes innumerable events that are frequently blurred into a confusing chaos of mere broken shards of collective memory..
And so the dramatic action of the play begins on November 22, 1963…
What is going on with this crazy presidential election?
Above is the map of how counties voted on November 4, 2020. Compare with the map below of which states are open for business and which are still in a fairly serious state of lockdown.
Headlines of the Election Process Thus Far
First things first. Extremely impressive Blue Wave, endorsing Democrats and repudiating Trump nationwide, wouldn’t you agree? Well, at least on the east and west coasts and in the hippie chunk of the southwest. This is pretty much how the election broke down in 2016, too, when the Democrats also won the popular vote. The blue bits on this county map happen to be where the most votes are. Which means that the popular vote is dominated by major urban centers, whose issues and priorities are distinctly different from those of the overwhelming majority of counties (i.e., geographic/economic regions) in the rest of the country. Trump won significantly more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016, yet he still lost both the popular vote and the Electoral College. Which must mean that the Biden-Harris ticket managed to drive Democrat turnout significantly upward, despite the fact that Biden and Harris barely campaigned at all. How did they do that?
Three or four possible answers. The one the Democrats would have us believe is that they won on the issues, Trump having failed to do what he promised in 2016 as an untried and controversial outsider: improve the economy, reduce taxes and business regulations, reduce unemployment, regain control of U.S. borders (‘Build the Wall!’) and trade policy, disengage the nation from combat and direct engagement in Iran and Afghanistan, restore manufacturing jobs to the rust belt, fix the broken Veterans Administration, rebuild the U.S. military, negotiate more peaceful diplomatic relations with the Middle East and more equitable with Iran and North Korea, secure energy independence for the United States, and withdraw from the crushingly expensive participation in the Paris Climate Accords. Except that he did all of these things, keeping more promises and accomplishing more positive change for more people than any president in memory. On top of which, a president supposedly disliked and disrespected around the world has been nominated four times for the Nobel Peace Prize.
We’re asked to believe that a clear majority of the American people prefer the Democrat platform of eliminating the fossil fuel industry, big city police departments, all U.S. borders, and the Trump tax cuts… because the vision of a United States modeling itself on Cuba and Venezuela is just so inspiring that everyone somehow, irrationally, shares the Antique Vision of AOC, Colin Kaepernick, Nancy Pelosi, and the Marxist political gospel of graybeard Bernie Sanders, aka “the man who could not be nominated.” Sorry, that dog won’t hunt.
Second, the real return on the endless investigations and attacks on Donald Trump have simply worn out the voter population. In this scenario, it no longer matters that none of these investigations (and impotent impeachment burlesque) has ever produced any evidence of a crime. Maybe they’ve just been convinced, finally, that he’s too rough-edged and plain spoken to be president, or why else would he have so many enemies? He’s not nice. Except that choosing Biden over Trump is not any kind of movement toward niceness. Biden is more corrupt, sexually perverted, personally vicious, racially prejudiced, and self-serving than Trump ever was. That dog doesn’t hunt either. Unless surrender to the haters of the left is some kind of vain hope that the nastiness of the last five years will go away if we put the Killers from the Swamp in charge. If that’s it for any of you, I promise you’ll get not what you hope for but what you deserve.
The other two explanations for Trump’s defeat are related. They are the net impact of the COVID virus and the consequent collapse of discipline in the American voting process. COVID was eleventh hour salvation for the left. Something which, though an Act of God or an Act of the ChiComs, could be blamed squarely on Trump, no matter how he tried to handle it. And blame him they did, for every case and every death, while the Democrats in urban centers did everything possible to make the virus more costly, frightening, inconvenient, confusing, and (at times) more deadly than it had to be. (How many senior citizens had to be quarantined in nursing homes to catch the virus from one another and quickly expire?) Even the sacrifice of the elderly could be simply assigned to Trump. And so it was.
Not surprisingly, with significant chunks of big and small business shut down indefinitely, with people quarantined in their homes or isolated even in public by masks, a depression was created that was more than economic. It was also spiritual, national, and deliberately Trump focused. It wasn’t a shared crisis we worked together to overcome. It was a colossal political blunder by the man who tried more than anyone in the world to defeat it.
This was actually only the first blow of a one-two punch. COVID provided the perfect excuse for savaging the tradition of voting at the polls. That was no longer practical to a housebound population. What was absolutely (and patriotically) required was voting by mail. Which resulted in a hideously disorganized and opaque process of launching mail-in forms to anyone and everyone, uninvited, via the U.S. Postal Service, with no managerial control, no accountability, and no quality assurance. The piles of consequent paperwork guaranteed the election could not be decided in one night, one week, or one month. Just keep counting till you have enough votes. Too many hands, too many cooks, and the political soup is hopelessly spoilt. The result is what the bureaucrats in charge tell us it was, and the courts can’t effectively intervene because they depend on the input of finders of fact who do not exist. The map below shows which states played the greatest roles in the whole vote-by-mail charade. Just for fun, compare this map to the ones above. Now you know the answer to how candidates who did not campaign engineered a massive increase in Dem voter turnout. And no hanging chads to worry about this time. Are you laughing yet?
And so here we are. Trump lost. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the NBC/CBS/ABC/PBS/CNN/MSNBC/ FoxNews bullhorn tell us so. The Department of Justice is otherwise engaged in shredding documents of their five years of coup attempts, and there is no way to prove the mass media majority wrong. They finally got their way. Who loses? We do.
Law. An enormous pile of books containing very specific, very carefully chosen words describing what is legal and what is illegal, thus providing a platform for lawyers to argue that whatever the words mean, they’re just not clear enough to justify a decision against their client(s) in this particular case. See also Legislation. Lawful. Full of law, subject to interpretation by lawyers. Lawyers. Brilliant men and women of high principle and integrity, who work devotedly for justice on behalf of the Amerian people and/or their clients by translating the law into a meaningless pile of empty bullshit. See also TV lawyers.
Chapter 8
For example, the whole constitution of the Most Chosen Nation on Earth is based on one overridingly important principle,
2 Namely, the principle that nobody can be trusted,
3 Which used to make people take a pretty active interest in politics,
4 Because of all the things they didn’t trust,
5 Government was the thing they didn’t trust the most.
6 But then things changed,
7 Because they finally figured out that the thing they didn’t trust the most was each other,
8 Which was when they decided that it was the government’s job to watch over everyone,
9 And especially the ones they didn’t trust the most,
10 Like the rich capitalists who might steal everybody else’s money if they weren’t held in check,
11 And the poor losers who might get violent and destroy everything if their basic needs weren’t taken care of.
12 And that’s when the government hired a whole bunch of people like you to do the watching,
13 Which has worked out great,
14 Because now that they don’t want to think about anything at all,
15 They kind of have to trust you,
16 Unless they’re willing to get involved themselves,
17 Which isn’t likely to happen,
18 Anytime soon.
Chapter 9
In short, you couldn’t be in a better position,
2 Whether you do your job or not,
3 Which means that they’ll ultimately accept whatever you do,
4 Even if they complain a lot,
5 Because you work for the government,
6 And who else can you trust in this Most Chosen Nation on Earth?
7 That why there’s nothing you can’t get away with,
8 At all,
9 As long as you remember a few simple guidelines.
Executive Branch. The branch of government run by the Presdent, responsible for pandering to the Amerian people, collecting their money, writing their checks, and running the country by executive order when the Congress is too busy empeaching the Presdent to pass any legislation. Executive Order. The means by which the Presdent runs the country without having to bother with Congress, the budget, or other bureaucratic restraints; he simply orders the Treasury Department to write a check and tells the payee how he wants the money spent. Cool.
Thanks to the unending scandals of the Clinton administration, a new family of political tactics has been created, based on the rediscovery that the letter of the law can always be interpreted into advantageous meaninglessness. Not coincidentally, this was the means by which Hitler heisted the German government from the Weimar Republic. His entire reign was nominally a legal suspension of the constitution for the purposes of dealing with a national emergency without having to deal with the legislative branch.
I’m not saying that the current election crisis is itself a coup d’etat. Rather, it is an oddly quick second application of the mechanism developed by Democrats to survive the impeachment process. The mechanism is nullification of law by heaping so much negative minutiae on top of the law – including its language, procedures, enforcers, and legitimacy – that its animating spirit is progressively belittled and ultimately smothered. With all of the pyrotechnics we’ve experienced in recent weeks, who is still able to see that the entire Democratic Party position amounts to no more than a pitiful argument by anecdote: “If a single person was unable to vote his preference, for any reason, that is reason enough for rewriting the election laws of Florida from the bench, ex post facto.” Uh, no it ain’t. But aim enough unscrupulous lawyers at a black-and-white situation, and it is speedily reduced to a sticky gray goo that blinds or paralyzes everyone. That’s how the President survived his trial in the Senate, and it’s how the Gore team intends to capture the White House. An amazing one-two punch.
Strangely enough, from the standpoint of a Gore presidency, it may seem one day soon that he had to come to power in exactly this way to achieve the effective coup d’etat that may be waiting in the wings. Yet in the normal course of affairs, such a circumstance would appear to be a remote possibility, not one that could ever be planned as part of a deliberate increase in presidential power. Thus, one is so struck by the oddness of its appropriateness to the overall situation that there is a tendency not to analyze, not to look beyond the circumstance itself for an emerging pattern in which it is, somehow, an obvious necessity.
I believe, however, that the pattern is there. The explanation for the oddness of its timing – coming so quickly after the battering given the rule of law in the impeachment debacle — probably lies in the collective unconscious of the American people. An urgent moral drama is being enacted on the center of our national stage, and we have this one brief moment – consistent with the rules of Greek tragedy – in which we might but probably will not call a halt. We have asked for this, whether we know it or not, and we will surely reap the harvest of whatever decision we make or do not make.
What is the essence of the drama? A long-delayed confrontation between the origins of the American democratic experiment and its current incarnation, 68 years after the New Deal. These are direct opposites. The founders sought to protect citizens from the worst of all evils: government. The post-New Deal ‘liberals’ seek to protect citizens from everyone and everything by means of the government. The notion, shared by most people, that there can be some working compromise between such polar opposites is naive. Structural opposites can exist in a state of constantly changing compromises, moving back and forth between the absolute limits set by the structural design. But the opposition we are considering here is not structural. It is philosophical. In this realm, nominal compromises are frauds; they exist as optical illusions only, mirages reflected from the surface of convenient words whose roots grow in utterly different soil. One cannot be half-Stoic and half Epicurean, half-capitalist and half-Marxist, half-Christian and half-atheist. Whatever rhetoric is used to disguise the conflict does not resolve the conflict. The ideas are, by definition, at war with one another. They will surface, and perhaps not as philosophical imperatives, but as warriors in a battle for control of the operative structure. Because of the extended timeframe over which such battles are fought, people can be lulled into interpreting the war as a working compromise. The fundamental agreement that must characterize compromise is not present, however; regardless of the positions taken by the superficial manipulators at the political center, the war goes on until there is a clear victor and a clear conquest. This is the climactic event we are approaching now.
The roots of the notion that government exists to protect people from everyone and everything are totalitarian, not democratic. It is worthwhile here to ask a question that has always been more interesting than its conventional explanation: Why were the founders so insistent about creating a clear line between church and state? The usual response – that they feared imposition of a state religion – is only a part, an example in fact, of the larger answer, which is that what they most feared was the power of a government that could claim to hold moral authority over the populace. In this direction lies ultimate tyranny.
I remember being taught the difference between authoritarian governments and totalitarian governments. (Interestingly, divine right kingships were generally included in the category of authoritarian governments, if for no other reason than that totaliarianism was regarded as a twentieth century invention made possible only by advanced technology.) Authoritarian governments exert control over only those behaviors which affect their ability to retain power; thus, they do not care what people believe as long as they do not threaten the legitimacy of the government. Totalitarian governments exert control over everything, expressly including what people believe, because the most dangerous opposition always arises from competitors to the moral authority of the government; thus, Soviet communism must outlaw the Catholic Church and declare atheistic materialism as the cosmological philosophy of the state. But why must moral authority reside in the state itself? Because such a system can retain its legitimacy only by postulating all its actions to be right automatically, in advance, because its claim to be acting in the peoples’ interest will inevitably be exposed as a lie. The equality of those outside the government is the equality of slaves to a state whose every bureaucratic twist and turn are law. And the greatest and most obvious privilege of those who are part of the government consists of relative freedom from the very bureaucracy that demands life-or-death obedience from the people at large. Such a state exists for its own sake only; therefore, it cannot tolerate any value system in which its hypocrisies might be visible.
Notably, the cornerstone of the constitutional edifice created by the founders in their attempt to preempt governmental tyranny was the rule of law. And it is expressly the rule of law which must be kept separate from the ‘church,’ however that is defined. For American jurisprudence was from its outset clear that the legal system was not a moral system per se; true justice was deemed the province of God in His infinite wisdom. The law was a parallel mechanism intended to exemplify morality rather than define it. And the law, in this context, would have to be absolutely governed by rules which might or might not result in justice, but which could be used to achieve outcomes that were approximately just, if the rules were followed and understood in their intent by carefully trained, morally upright practitioners of law. Why the separation? Two reasons. First, acceptance of the notion that true justice was not achievable by men meant that the more important (because more achievable) goal of the legal system was avoidance of gross injustice to innocents, even at the cost of letting malefactors go free. Second, postulating the law as an imperfect human mechanism made it clear that the state was ultimately less important and authoritative than the moral consensus of the populace. As a human invention, the law and its administration could become corrupt. In the same terms, the law could evolve and embody some forms of compromise that would not be possible if it were equated with the divine inspiration accorded to the Bible. It would not have to be right all the time; it would have to be consistent and fair in the application of its own rules. And, implicitly, it would be up to the people to decide when and if the law, and the government it framed, was failing in its moral duties to the populace by becoming corrupt, inconsistent, or unfair. Obviously, any government that could wrap its actions in an all-encompassing morality would no longer be accountable in this fashion. Thus, the rule of law – separate and unequal to the laws of God and the religious convictions of the populace. Still, there was one area of equality foreseen by the founders; that is, equality under the law for all citizens, regardless of rank, wealth, or other privilege. This was to be the prize that forgave the law its many inevitable errors and omissions. Acknowledged at the outset to be imperfect and far from divine, it would succeed in retaining the consensus support of a moral populace by continuously aspiring to justice, in accordance with rules that were the same for all. Not a bad bit of reasoning by a bunch of rich, Bible-beating ignoramuses…
Note that there is an essential humility to this approach. It is neither cynical nor prideful. It says, there is such a thing as justice, known in its entirety only by God, though it is our duty and our best hope to strive for it as best we can, overcoming our own imperfections by remaining aware of the difficulty of the undertaking and the abiding responsibility it entails.
What happens, however, if we remove God from this construct? Since justice resides ultimately in God, as example and arbiter of human affairs, without Him there can no longer be any justice; there is only the law. And without the continuous aspiration to justice on the part of the law’s practitioners – which is to say, without the personal moral commitment to look past the letter of the law to the intent and spirit of the law – there remains nothing but words, words which can be stood on their heads by an agile mind that is bent on circumventing their obvious meaning.
It is here that the totalitarian roots of government as Supreme Protector come into play. The emotional basis of New Deal liberalism may have been compassion, but the worm in the apple is condescension. The intellect so disposed beholds the fact of rampant injustice in aspects of life never dreamt of by the founders as amenable to amelioration by the state. He beholds injustice in the very lot in life to which individual citizens are born – he beholds the millions who are ushered into life with unfair disadvantages of opportunity, intellect, talent, and cultural legacy. He does not ascribe this to God’s will, because God has been removed from the construct by science. He ascribes it to chance, tradition, bigotry, and inaction by those who know better. He therefore defines a new moral ideal, one cast in strictly human terms, which comes to represent a mission whose ends justify the means employed by those who know better. From the peak of this new moral ideal, he condemns the mass of humankind for tolerating and abetting the perpetuation of such a priori inequality. And he therefore forgives himself in advance for what must to done to eliminate such inequality.
What has he done at this point, before he has even taken any action? He has moved himself into the vacant position once occupied by God. Now he is the example and arbiter; he is superior to human law; he is more than equal, in that he may commit, in the name of true justice, what other lesser humans may regard as sin; and he is not accountable to their definitions and beliefs because he has defined their legitimacy out of existence.
Most importantly, he has created a new construct in which the mass of humanity and the consensus that underlies their society are not an ideal to be served, but an obstacle to be overcome. He gives up easily on the challenge of converting them to his way of thinking, because such a conversion process would eventually lead to the declaration, “Trust me because I know better than you.” He scorns accommodating his ideas to the legacy he has supposedly inherited, because he has already declared himself superior to that legacy. Thus, he is not in his private thoughts engaged in any exotic act of upholding the Constitution; he is bent instead on rewriting the Constitution to the extent necessary to make it conform to his self-anointed moral ideal. Yet he feels the weight of convention, the burden of the enduring stupidity of the masses. He knows that in order to prevail, he must appeal on a case-by-case basis to the self-interest of those he intends to help, confident that they will accept the figleaf cover of his rhetoric, and to all the others he is prepared to lie, misrepresent, and intimidate. Without the divine power of God, he must use his divine certainty with utter ruthlessness, always of course in the name of true justice.
He is committing an act of subversion. It is he who therefore inaugurates the war. His tactics are the tactics of warfare: divide and conquer. The goal is creation of a state which controls unto itself the definition of true justice and is equipped with the power to impose it. Since this is antithetical to the Constitution, the law which protects the right of the people to persist in their stupidity is a titanic, contemptible obstacle. In his head, he carries a running tally of old law versus new law; that is, the existing protections for what used to be revered as freedom, as opposed to the new powers and controls available to those who wish to put down bigotry, end inequality, and protect the helpless. He grows stronger as he passes more and more new law, which inevitably seeks to insert government into realms never contemplated by the founders: the workplace, the home, the family, the church (the latter reached by new laws of exclusion…). In the process, his contempt for all law increases. Old law is obstruction of true justice, the enemy to be smashed, circumvented, outwitted. New law is the pretext by which he moves closer to a vision of true justice that will grow ever more hungry for power.
Similarly, the “will of the people” is not a thing to be respected, revered, earned. It is a farce which can be and must be manipulated, used, created out of thin air whenever possible. His contempt for the actual “people” through time becomes so profound that he no longer counts it a lie to tell them what they must be told to accept the next step, the next law, the next initiative on their behalf. If they were not so hopelessly stupid, after all, they would not have to be dragged, step by step by step, to the relative paradise he is devising for them.
Throughout this evolution of political philosophy and practice, a metamorphosis has been underway. The moral idealist becomes by his own choices utterly corrupt. He will say and do anything to achieve the next increment of change. He will say and do anything to defeat his opposition, which is by definition immoral in its opposition to true justice. He reaches the point of no longer being able to recognize that anyone is operating by rules that are different from his own. Therefore, everyone else is also lying, misrepresenting, intimidating, dividing and conquering. The perfidy of their doing so in the name of evil justifies any and all means used to destroy them when they mount opposition of any kind.
Yet the veneer is maintained. The public words are of democracy, the Constitution, the will of the people, the American way. And the people do not recognize the war that is underway, ostensibly on their behalf. It is only when the stakes are truly large that the viciousness of the struggle leaks out into the open: the Bork hearings, the Thomas hearings, the impeachment, the 2000 presidential election. But even this is ultimately to the good, because in bits and pieces the people can be inured to the outrages that must be committed to the law, in the name of true justice. Gradually, they can be taught to understand that the law can and should be battered to pieces when it stands in the way of true justice, as defined by those with the loud, insistent voices. And when outright flouting and contempt for the law actually succeed in matters of national moment, they will learn a fairly easy part of the necessary lesson described below (from the Lounge Conversations, Loyerz Station):
As long as people continue to believe there is some moral component of the law, they will look to the law and the legal system to vindicate their own sense of what is right and wrong. Some will be tempted to pursue matters of principle through the courts. Others will be tempted to disobey laws they believe to be wrong. Still others will operate very close to the margin of the law, believing that they are in the right as long as they do not transgress the letter of the law. All of these behaviors reflect an intensity of individual spirit which is problematic in a country where all important decisions are made by bureaucratic committees and political compromises. You see, in exceptionally large and complex societal systems, the operating rules gradually evolve to a set that benefits the smooth functioning of the system. These rules do not correspond in any sense to notions of individual morality, which are not invented by committees but by human beings. The truth is that the most successful societal operating rules are pragmatic rather than moral. They retain an inefficient moral component only as long as there is sufficient individuality in the culture at large to pose a threat if the operating rules are perceived as amoral or anti-moral. It is therefore a necessary step for a self-aggrandizing system to eliminate the resolve of individuals to mount an opposition. The best way to do this is to make it clear that the law is not to be used, but to be feared. If being right ceases to matter in a court of law, the moralistic individual will learn to avoid the law like a contagious disease. He will learn to obey every law, no matter how foolish, follow every regulation, no matter how stupid, as if his life depended on it. Because it does.
Where do we stand in the ongoing war between the founders and the new moral arbiters? At the brink. The 2000 election divides the populace roughly in half, with a significant minority sitting somewhere in the middle between the two sides, without firm convictions about the major philosophical issue at stake. These are the ones who haven’t thought about it, but it has already been proven that they can be controlled: this is the lesson taught by the majority opposition to removing the president from office for perjury and obstruction of justice.
The next president will therefore face a congress that is virtually doomed to partisan impotence. In his last year in office, Clinton has been dexterously pioneering a new form of executive governance; rule by executive order. This has gone virtually unnoticed. What better way to prepare the populace for a President Gore who will ultimately claim a mandate for ignoring Congress in favor of going directly to the “people” for support of rule by executive order, in the name of safety, compassion, and “true justice.” It will cease to matter that he stole the election; he did it for the “will of the people,” as polls will no doubt confirm. And should George Bush somehow persevere in nailing down the election he won, he will be so constantly accused of having stolen the election himself that the “will of the people’ will be used by Democrats in Congress throughout his term to incapacitate government until the Democrats can be put in charge for good.
That’s the plan anyway, as generously provided for by serendipity.
We recently watched in the same week of flight from the MSM the movie Mowgli and the miniseries Watership Down. An odd coincidence because Watership Down really seemed a bit like Mowgli transplanted from the jungle to the English countryside with all the wolves and tigers and monkeys replaced by rabbits. Both productions were extraordinarily good and I couldn’t help thinking ‘What if’ type thoughts. What if you took, say, the Lord of the Rings and replaced all the hobbits and elves and dwarves, etc, with dogs? Wouldn’t that be fun? Then I remembered I already did that five years ago. Would you like to see it? Great. It’s in nine parts. Here it is:
2019 will be a momentous year. Let that suffice for predictions. Now we have a moment to consider where we are at the end of 2018, and in my opinion most are having difficulty determining that because of a problem with their mental models. I’m going to talk about this without apologizing for length or scope. As always, my chief concern is leaving a record for the ones who will come later, after we are all dust.
I’m organizing this in several parts. First up, a mental model lots of people are using, whether you know of it or not.
1. The Overton Window
This is a model developed in the 1990s. By model I mean a conceptual framework for understanding things that are happening and to some extent how and why, the better to prepare for the future. A conceptual model is a metaphor, a hopefully elegant way of saying “this is like that.” We all have them, in all sizes and scales, modeling our own views of how the world works and even the things in it, from internal combustion engines to PTA meetings.
The Overton Window is a model for distinguishing what’s possible and what isn’t at any given point in time. What’s inside the window frame is the realm in which change, reform, breakthroughs, bad stuff, whatever you want to call it, is possible. What’s hidden and therefore outside of the window frame is the past, the future obviously, and whatever long term process timeline is unfolding. Here’s an example of how the Overton Window is used to explain things.
Same sex romance and politics as reflected by popular music in the 1970s and 1980s.
Feel free to blow up the window size to identify titles and pics.
Status of same sex politics and romance by the time of the Obama Administration.
Pop music may seem trivial as a ‘window’ on the realm of the possible, but it is in some ways sufficient. What’s important from this vantage point? We’re looking at a huge change here, one accomplished in the approximate ten year gap between 1999 and the first Obama term. (We’re naming him for timeline purposes, not as a prime cause.) In the earlier window, hit songs are about self acceptance, coming out, and the emotional burden of homosexuals generally in the American culture. In the later window there is no more asking for acceptance but aggressive, demanding self confidence, a vision of “having it all,” whatever that might consist of.
Overton Window 1’s realm of the possible seems to be what we might call a Separate Peace, a live and let live accommodation between the straight and gay worlds. Overton Window 2 is a realm in which open, state-sponsored gay marriage is not only a possibility but an inevitability. Mind that we are talking about a truly massive shift in public opinion in this differential, on an issue that cuts very deeply to the heart of the cultural consensus on the meaning of human sexuality.
The value of the Overton Model is supposed to lie not in any trick of managed perception but in the opportunity to identify change and try to track its progression from where we were to where we are. The fact of progression is perhaps the key part of any Overton analysis. A timeline is always there, right behind the time segment being focused on. In our case it looks like this:
The ‘open’ window is outlined in black. The timeline graphic has been there behind the wall the whole time.
Our interest is not in the causes for the rapid transition we’re seeing; it’s in the way the model actually works and whether its way of working is effective and useful. Like any conceptual model/metaphor its purpose is to provoke questions and suggest lines of inquiry. Where in the timeline do events behind the pop music culture line up with or explain the transition? What makes the same sex constituency acquire so much more boldness and how is the growth in their assertiveness, anger, and power accomplished at such speed? It might be useful to ask, for example, if we are seeing a spontaneous change of mind here or a mere inevitability mandated by judicial fiat.
It is here that the Overton Window falls short. The window shows us a point of view, not a chain of cause and effect, and it has a structural bias not shown but implicit. We have used the word ‘progression’ several times now. That is what the proffered timeline shows. It is showing us a context in which change is to be understood implicitly as ‘progression’s cognate ‘progress.’
How does it do this? Look at the way the model works in a technical sense. (Check the directional arrows in the previous graphic.) It is the window itself which is being dragged forward through a set of ordered time events that exist independently; that is, they ‘are written’ and the window has to move to keep up. Interestingly, this means that the timeline itself is actually pointing backward, progress working its own will on the focus of the window. The next window, for example, will bring elements of an as yet unseen timeline of progress leftward/backward from today’s future into a new already ‘written’ now. It’s not hard for us to guess that that future timeline includes TG rights, unisex bathrooms, and the demolition of the word ‘gender’ as a meaningful descriptor of anything.
This distortion is an artifact of how the model works, and it is quite easy to see how its reliance on the emotional appeal of progressive transitions can break down utterly and embarrassingly.
Here’s our final application of the Overton Window, focusing this time on progressive perspectives on Donald J. Trump:
Two distant dates. Two different perspectives. What kind of progressive transition will the Overton timeline show us?
Maybe the timeline will show us an evolution, a development, a logical progression from one mental state to another.
Huh. The Overton Window appears to be broken. It can’t point to real causes, and it can’t predict the ‘progress’ that will inevitably occur from this point forward.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen. We are going to be needing a better conceptual model of what is going on in the heads of the Progress Party. It just so happens we have one.
That brings us to the end of Part 1. The next part, Of Graphics and Tables, can be found here:
The most important thing a conceptual model of our present situation should do is explain the extraordinary phase transition regarding Donald Trump that occurred on November 6, 2016, and has not budged at all, not even a blip, in terms of the view of him cherished by the people who call themselves liberals, Democrats, Progressives, and hard line traditional conservatives.
A valid model will not involve reliance on opinion polls, pop culture fads, election horserace tactics or even overarching political strategies. The model will involve understanding the particular reality our culture as a whole is living in, which is not synonymous with anything that can be compiled from statistics of various sorts or the meticulously quoted words of those who have opined about the nature of 21st century reality. Why?
Because reality has become a very dicey business. Broadly and accurately speaking, reality is easy to define as the way things are, the superset of all things of all kinds everywhere, seen and unseen, from the particle and string level to the cosmological/multiverse level. Every kind of reality definition you encounter in contemporary America, however, is only a subset of that greater reality, because the one human drive even more powerful than sex and survival is the imperative to chop reality down to manageable size, in accordance with our own agreed upon criteria.
Here is the metaphor for that subsetted reality I propose:
Yes. A tabletop. A hard glossy, formerly living surface with no legs. Of course, every man, jack, and jill has his own tabletop, and those tabletops have legs you can see and depend upon.
There are others among us, of course, who have their own legless tabletops, but they are not on THIS particular tabletop.
The Main Tabletop is an extrapolation from the rise of science during and after the European Enlightenment that gave us chemistry, biology, geology, cosmology, physics, medicine, information technology, and other disciplines relying on the hard rules of the Scientific Method given us by Sir Isaac Newton. Breakthroughs in these areas also gave us somewhat less nuts-and-bolts-type disciplines like economics, psychology, anthropology, capitalism, earth sciences, and most marvelous of all, advanced mathematics.
The tabletop has no legs because they were finally chopped off in the 19th century when Newton’s mission statement was thrown overboard because it declared science a tool for better understanding and honoring Divine Creation. The toolset he devised was retained, however, and his religious delusions are now chalked up to his Asperger’s.
Hence the Tabletop of our model. It has a hard surface, representing definite tangible reality. Nothing is permitted on its surface but that which can be measured, counted, catalogued, seen, touched, stored, dissected, and plugged into various kinds of probability models and recordkeeping and modeling algorithms. Everything which does not meet these criteria is thrown over the side into the infinite nothingness which is the only larger universe the scientists dare to accept. The meaninglessness of the nothingness is the indispensable tool for declaring that it is not the responsibility of authoritative science to explain life, the universe, or the meaning of absolutely anything. What they have in place of literary mythology is a scientific narrative that tells them all they need to know about the weak-minded human race, where it’s going, and who should be in charge of it. Here’s what that narrative looks like on top of our table.
Don’t worry about the TV show. We’ll get around to it. Runs on PBS between pledge drives.
This isn’t that hard a model component to parse. Just remember that nothing is permitted on this table that hasn’t been subjected to the myopic reality criteria of the current interpretation of the Scientific Method. We weren’t there to collect samples and conduct experiments on the fossils of the cosmologists’ Big Bang. We also can’t draw any sort of line from the beginning of Darwinian Evolution back to the origin of life, which can’t be nailed to the table and must therefore be thrown off it. What we have are fossils of dinosaurs, Darwin’s Theory postulated (by consensus of the cognoscenti) as Fact, and the measurable, countable physical evidence of about 5,000 years of human civilization. Which is quite enough, thank you, to produce repeatable results on the subject of human empires, the inevitability of man’s obsession with building more powerful weapons, and only one what you’d call ‘scientific’ route out of the omnipresent pattern of doom: technology; i.e., building computers and systems and robots that are smarter than we are and uncompromised by dangerous variables like individuality. And please don’t forget there’s no earthly reason for looking beyond this particular tabletop, because the physicists have discovered proofs that we simply cannot ever know enough about the big mess called the universe to look out there for help or even answers. If we had any questions left.
Which leaves only the one residual and not that important question anyone has to deal with. Who should be running things as the human experience winds down. Scientists are too bored to do it. Much much better to make high six figure salaries spending government money on detail-oriented projects like whether birds or feathers came first in the evolutionary Jitterbug.
Did somebody mention government? That’s obviously who should be running things. It should look like democracy and say fine words about liberty, opportunity, equality, elections, and progress, while doing what is necessary, which is a hard detail-intensive job for experts in dozens of academically approved disciplines. The technocracy they create is immune to everything merely human that opposes it, and the control of the tabletop by technocrats is absolute. Why they have all those meetings and hearings and managed planning projects. Theirs is the tabletop the scientists’ model of reality brought into being.
All is for the best in the least dangerous of all conceivable realities.
Great progress has been made by the time of the 21st century. The ruins of the horror called Christianity, which began the Enlightenment and only by accident failed to end it, have been pushed so far over the edge of the table that they’ll careen into the void any day now. Thankfully, there’s a substitute for religion produced by ever helpful science, which retains the fear of apocalypse in the form of a long term mankiller called climate change that can be used to give the technocrats a kind of papal authority. The advantage of this kind of artificial religion is that you really can measure and count and quantify things of earth to a fare-thee-well, and no big amorphous phantasm called the Flying Spaghetti Monster or some such pejorative nickname has any power over a human government that owns the reins of political power, the applications of information technology, and the will to ride roughshod over the rebellious in the name of those who prefer to live under the wing of a bureaucrat who tells the same lies enough times. Take that, Spaghetti Monster:
Look at that sad cloud formation. Pitiful.
Whoops. That graphic made our tabletop look just a little smaller in the scheme of things. But the sheer size and extent and variety of things not included or permitted on the tabletop doesn’t give them any power. All of the stuff that doesn’t belong, can’t be nailed, or ridiculed off the cold surface of REAL reality just doesn’t matter. Look at it all:
Esoteric crap. Who ever measured a sunspot or looked at it under a microscope or in an ice core? Nobody.
These are insubstantial fables. Everyone knows — and our experts have repeatedly proven — that there is no mystery about UFOs or Flight 19 or the Thunderbird of the Native Americans or legends of ghosts or worlds beyond our ken. You do the math.
Maybe not the right instruction. Math is a tricky subject. You can’t see it, measure it, or even count it or put it under a microscope or at the end of a telescope. It is far bigger, in fact infinitely bigger, than the science which uses it as a utilitarian tool. It is at least as large as the entire universe, and it contains so many nested infinities even these can’t be counted. And unfortunately the very sad fact for our tabletop is that math preexists mankind and, given the rules of operation of the universe as we claim to know it, math is older than the universe as well.
But there is no meaning. Math can have no real meaning either because it can’t be nailed to our tabletop. In that sense it doesn’t even exist. Something men made up by accident that looks sort of infinite from certain points of view.
Oh well.
What does any of this have to do with Trump and the curious case of the Overton Window? (Part 1 of this post)
This the end of Part 2. The concluding section is here:
We’ve seen the universe of things that can be ignored because they aren’t real and don’t exist.
Esoteric crap. Who ever measured a sunspot or looked at it under a microscope or in an ice core? Nobody. Not even possible. Like figuring out where the gigantic moon we see came from: a huge (yuge?) mystery staring them right in the face. Nobody cares.
See that little ship riding a cloud in the upper right quadrant? It’s called The Flying Dutchman. A ghost story of the sea. People like the fantasy, retell it, claim to have seen it. No harm done. It’s nothing.
Until you open your eyes one day and look up from the all powerful conference room table to behold this:
The Good Ship Trump.
The rest of this is pretty simple. There is nothing of what you’d call reasoned analysis in attempts from every quarter to deal with the Trump presidency. The ones who would ‘remove’ him (and that is exactly the right word) cannot even permit his existence. He is not real, he is not of the table that is their cramped universe, and they have no tools or words or strategies to undo his offense against reality as they perceive it. He is an absolute, proven impossibility that is nevertheless THERE in front of and above them. During the campaign they had a full year to nail him to the table, put him under their microscopes, dissect him from stem to stern, count his ‘lies,’ graph his unfitness for a place at the technocrat table. When they found they couldn’t even touch him, they repeatedly threw effigies of the Trump phantasm off the table, but he was always back in their faces, never fell off in fact. Now they are stuck, paralyzed in an incredibly long wail of denial because they have nothing but denial to throw at him.
That’s why the Trump phenomenon, particularly the bizarre reactions of so-called smart people and their loutish serfs, has always seemed so insane. It is insane. It’s a psychotic break, the kind experienced when one’s whole sense of reality is broken into bloody splinters.
It will continue. Whether they succeed in their nominal objectives or not, the broken ones will never be whole again. Their table has a permanent wobble. America on the other hand has a reality that includes far more than tax tables and regulatory bureaucracies. And the Americans who elected Trump aren’t likely to forget that again.
SURREAL PLACES — JOHN F. KENNEDY AIRPORT, 1985 (Introduction)
This is about my challenge to people to share their personal experience of surreal places in space and time. The inspiration piece was a list of fifteen such physical places that are in some way overwhelming, disorienting, or otherwise unforgettable. I offered to share fifteen of my own, hoping the process of investigating their own memories would cause people to discover uniquely powerful moments in their own lives, linked to specific physical places and times.
This one is something that could seem trivial. Why I worked to capture it in a graphic visual way.
The subject of the experience was in part at least a motorized beast called the Countach, shown below.
SURREAL PLACES — JOHN F. KENNEDY AIRPORT, 1985 (Part 1)
The airport once known as Idlewild and renamed after a presidential assassination was always a depressing place for me. The ride to Queens was a stark reminder of just how much the great city of New York had declined. Highways in bad shape, shoulders home to numerous unremoved wrecked and stripped cars, the route itself involving a sad passage by the remains of the 1964 New York World’s Fair, tall weeds marring the view of the fairground’s once gleaming now rusting globe. The sixties and afterwards had been hard on world’s mightiest metropolis.
The airport has always been one of the nation’s busiest, the prime hub of NYC’s international flights, but it seemed when I was there that the place was always strangely empty, the terminal an echoing barrack and the tarmac not empty of planes but nearly so. At JFK you get a sense of how vast the property is and how bleak the surrounding landscape. Other airports are so jammed up, so full of themselves and their busy-ness you tend to feel like you’re walking through the equivalent of a transportation casino. (Except in Philly, but that’s another grim story…)
I’m sure the unpopulated, or depopulated, feel I got at JFK was not a special experience reserved for me but a function of the off-hours schedules that seemed to accompany my international business flights, the only ones I needed JFK for. This day was like the others, far from the busiest time, and I boarded the only airliner I saw, settled in for the takeoff, in a window seat for some reason I can’t explain because it’s so atypical of me.
Not a very full flight as I recall, but more of us in business class.
The stewardesses (as some of us still thought of them) were bustling up and down the aisle, providing pillows and blankets, and I must have had a seatmate I didn’t want to exhaust my small supply of small talk with before we were even airborne, so I opened the blind of the window and looked out on the tarmac.
A ho hum glance.
And there was the most astonishing, fantastical sight I had ever seen at an airport. Much less than a hundred yards away, just forward of my window was an Air France Concorde, the first I had ever seen and the only one I ever would see. It was gorgeous, of course, more breathtaking in person than in its breathtaking photographs, low, white, weaponlike in shape but lovely of line and shockingly small compared to the Boeing 747 I was on.
Most shocking of all about the tableau before me was that the Concorde wasn’t even the most incredible thing in it.
Countach. A red Lamborghini Countach sitting on a huge wooden crate like some royal personage waiting with his vast luggage for dilatory attendants to arrive. Like ships, exotic sports cars are referred to as females, with the seductiveness, curves, and femme fatale temperaments to fit. Never thought of the Countach as anything but male, an Italian brute of a muscle car, four-square to the road and predatory in its stance. Here on a crate at JFK USA, the first Countach I had ever laid eyes on. Because they were famously unavailable in the United States.
It was a photo shoot. Had to be. The Countach was coming to the U.S. This might even be the first one. Nah, but close anyway. It wasn’t the Concorde that had brought it obviously. The crate was too damn big. It was a pairing of two of the world’s great mechanical beauties in a place of speed, glamor, and international flavor.
There you have it. My surreal moment at JFK. A jaded consultant injected with a disorienting rush of schoolboy enthusiasm. In my mind’s eye, I could see all the thousands, millions, of Countach posters tacked up on boys’ bedroom walls since the year 1978, a place of honor next to the iconic posters of Sophia, Raquel, Farrah, and whoever the It girl happened to be at the moment. The Countach was the It car of every boy who dreamed of going 200 mph with Sophia or Farrah at his side. None of those boys (well, say 99.9%, consultant talking) had ever seen what I was seeing now.
Cool. We done now? Should be, I suppose. But I like to show you old things I’m talking about. This was 33 years ago. Many of you have some familiarity with the Concorde and the Countach, close or distant, and more than I like to think probably know almost nothing of either except maybe for the tragic, fiery end of the world’s first supersonic airliner.
The Internet has no record of this event. I looked, using every search term I could think of. I was forced to a weak resort, finding photos on white backgrounds of the plane, the car (red!), and the crate. Particular angles required of all three. Laboriously assembled with many “close but no cigars.”
The Raw Materials
But how to put them together. I had Photoshop for a decade or so, but no longer. It perished in some computer nightmare years ago and I’ve not replaced it. The graphics I do must be done otherwise. I was complaining about my options to my wife, saying I can’t just post three different objects on white backgrounds and say, “All you have to do is imagine this one sitting on that one in front this great big one. Surreal, huh?!”
She said she thought it might be good that way. Imagination and all. Tried it. As you see here.
SURREAL PLACES — JOHN F. KENNEDY AIRPORT, 1985 (Part 2)
After I did that first Concorde-Countach rendering (or arranging), my wife liked it, or said so, and I hated it. So I dug as deep into my bag of graphic tricks as the bag was deep and produced this. I kind of liked it. My wife loved it. I was ready to go with it. Here it is.
I was proud of this one.
Conceptually pure. All elements in place. It was my favorite one.
SURREAL PLACES — JOHN F. KENNEDY AIRPORT, 1985 (Part 3)
On the verge of posting it I was reviewing all the interim graphic files I’d created with an eye to deleting a couple dozen of them when I saw a tarmac shot I hadn’t really studied before. Thought I’d try to up the ante on what I’d already done. Showed it to my wife thinking she’d probably agree that the all white background had a certain minimalist elegance about it that made it the right choice. No. She latched onto the new one with instant finality. “That’s the one. No contest.”
So here it is. I still kind of prefer the… oh forget it. This was the winner of the contest.
What I saw from the window of a 747. Almost exactly. My wife’s favorite.
P.S. Why am I boring you with the process of making a graphic? I think it might be the real proof of the impact this brief visual experience had on me. I had to do this for some reason. Pull a memory out of the mists of dreamy half-existence into living pixels. Not for you particularly, though partly, of course. But I did it for me. Re-orienting myself with respect to a gossamer airport romance, briefer but far more moving than a one night stand.
Has there ever been an ‘unperson’ in the modern history of the United States? The answer to that question is a resounding yes. His name was Augustus Zinsser-Zellbach, a self-made man from Brooklyn who rose to dizzying heights of fame and fortune, then plummeted into an obscurity so deep he might as well never have existed. You haven’t heard of him. His name will turn up in no Google searches. Yet he killed no one, never spent a day in jail, and was once accorded one of mass media’s highest honors. How can this be the case in an open uncensored society such as our own?
Augustus Zinsser-Zellbach (1898-1950)
ACT I — There Was Once a Boy Who…
The story begins, as we said, in Brooklyn, New York. Augustus J. Zinsser was born to typically mixed American parentage in 1898, on the cusp of the world-changing twentieth century. His father, James, was a generation away from Ireland and worked in the undertaking establishment started and still being run by young Augie’s immigrant namesake, respectfully addressed by almost everyone as “Mr. Zinsser.” Augie’s mother, Flora, was herself an immigrant of German roots by way of Canada, and her devout Lutheran heritage made for an uneasy union with hubby James — or Jay, as he was known at the local watering holes. In addition to Augustus, the couple had a firstborn daughter, May, who inherited her mother’s vocal disapproval of her father.
Despite quarrels about Jay’s drinking over the years, the old man — Mr. Zinsser even inside the family home — managed to maintain relative calm in the household. According to his grandson’s later recollections, he had a knack for grave teasing that insulted no one but drew laughs in tense situations. He could end even loud marital arguments by means of self-deprecating non-sequiturs. “Were you admonishing me, children? For a moment there I thought I’d put my hair on backwards again.” Always ridiculous and straight-faced. Never the same twice. The boy adored him. The two were inseparable outside of school hours, including the hearse runs on funeral days (both of them “dressed to kill” as they joked to each other without smiling). Even May liked the old man well enough. He’d made a present to them of his own boyhood tin soldiers, half to each, which won her heart.
What does any of this have to do with a mighty rise and fall in American fortunes? Those early years with a doting grandfather who kindly ruled the Zinsser roost were the opposite of what was to come, a series of momentous events that forever changed the direction of Augie’s life. In 1907, when the boy was nine, Mr. Zinsser fell down the basement stairs and broke his back. He survived but his life came to be circumscribed by the wheelchair he now needed to move about. In a walkup building (living quarters on third floor, funeral parlor on the second, “lab” facilities in the basement), he could no longer operate the business and was confined to a single smallish living area. This turned the Zinsser world upside down.
Jay had to take over the whole of the business. Before he had been comfortable in the role of, essentially, the maître d’ of the ground floor funeral parlor. All the rest of the work was the unflappable Mr. Zinsser’s job. Embalming, dressing, and preparing the bodies cosmetically, driving the hearse, calling on the bereaved before and after the funeral, and even presiding as a lay eulogist in the services held from time to time at the parlor. He did all the financial side as well, billing, accounts payable, collections, dealing with suppliers, and serving as liaison with priests, ministers, and rabbis. Nobody knew what all his responsibilities entailed. No one asked. Until the accident.
Now it was all on Jay, who responded by drinking more, having more quarrels with Flora, making an enemy of May and a stranger of his own son. Early in 1908, in a show of desperate bluster, he purchased a brand new Locomobile hearse with the last of the rainy day cash Mr. Zinsser had socked away in his sock drawer. Flora was apoplectic. Business was bad and getting worse, she was taking in washing now to help pay mounting past due bills, and she claimed the Locomobile, which doubled as family transportation, was much harder to drive than the ancient Model T that was always good enough before.
She must have been right, one evening when Augie was about 12, shortly after Mr. Zinsser’s Quiet Death, Flora was traveling to an evening meeting of her group across town and accidentally ran into Jay returning home in the dark after a business get-together down the street. Actually ‘ran into’ is less accurate than ‘ran over,’ which left Jay’s legs squashed and bleeding like his father’s before him. He recovered sufficiently to return home some weeks later, but ironically and fatally, suffered a fall of his own down the basement steps as he was transferring from the wheelchair to an amateurish slide contraption he’d built to get down to the lab. Always a tinkerer, he had ‘tinkerered’ himself to death this time, as May waggishly put it. The coroner, a longtime associate of the business, laughed when he heard this. “More likely ‘drinkerered’ himself to death,” he muttered loudly enough to be heard in the neighborhood.
There were some, mostly Irish, who had doubts about two crippling accidents to the Zinsser men and two basement falls, even if circumstances differed between father and son. Flora ignored the talk and did two strong-willed things. She took over the business and resuscitated it with a new kind of client, widows of men who had died while working for companies with deep pockets. These could be found throughout Brooklyn, not justbin the neighborhood. She became a kind of compensation counselor, instructing her new and potential clients about the kinds of accidents that might be paid for by a big-business settlement. Whatever money she made was saved out of everyone else’s knowledge and reach. May may have known more than she ever let on, but Augie’s relationship with both mother and sister continued to decline on a steeper curve than it had been on before.
He did to learn to cook, though, because his mother’s evenings were increasingly taken up with her new passion, leadership in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), an environment and a cause in which she thrived, grew, and acquired real political clout. Following in parallel footsteps, May became similarly active in her late teenage years in the Women’s Suffrage Movement. While the women in his life protested and carried signs with big pointed handles, Augie found old bound and printed cookbooks once collected by the grandmother he’d never known, and taught himself what he could with the modest but not meager household allowance his mother gave him. He discovered baking, and crêpes, and coq au vin (made with grape juice aged in the closet), and best of all pommes frites and Golden loaves of French bread. He frequently ate dinner alone though, except when he got a visit from an old friend of his father’s who had heard about “the boy who could cook like a hotel chef.”
The old friend was also very much interested in the political activities of Flora and May. As their devotion to their causes appeared to reach near simultaneous fruition with the passage of the 19th and 20th Amendments, he confided in Augie, “You got to find a way out of here, son. Their heads is going to explode with all their new female pride and power. Don’t be around it anymore than you have to.”
They discussed it over Augie’s concoctions with patisseries, hors d’ouvres, entrées, and fromages, and within months, the motherless sisterless boy was launched into a daily train commute to and from Manhattan, where work as a busboy was easy to find in the Prohibition world of speakeasies and well connected hotel bars.
This was the biggest turning point yet in the life of Augie, now Augustus, who was leaving Brooklyn in the rearview mirror not just physically but spiritually as well. The break was real, a sort of fracture, but it wasn’t complete. After Jay’s death Flora had abandoned the Zinsser surname and returned to her maiden name of Zellbach, reflecting her German (and Lutheran) forebears. She’d made it legal in court, and required Augie to register for school as Augie Zellbach, a name that appeared on every form of identification he had so far acquired. In New York City, he changed the rules of the game. He kept the Zellbach to avoid confusion, but he added the Zinsser back in, along with his sainted grandfather and martyred father. The hyphen that joined the two surnames was like the connection in his soul between Brooklyn and Manhattan, equal in reality if not in affection. Because the young Augustus Zinsser-Zellbach was head over heels in love with that island of brilliant skyscraper dreams he had seen only as a steel and concrete silhouette before reaching his age of majority. Twenty-One. Also the name of a fabulous club where he was on the waiting list for part-time work. Drum flourish and cymbal crash. The end of the beginning.
From here, we’ll let the pictures tell the tale, just so you can get the raw feel of a story played out in the press and tabloids. Later, there will be an epilogue though, an attempt to make sense of what happened here. Look for it.
Flora and May Zellbach
Literary Prohibition
The Love Of His Life
He went to school and fell in love down the street from the Parlor.
The ZZ Taxi Taxi, 1924
The T4 ‘Tracker’
The Christie Co. ‘CC Safe’
An early artist’s rendering of the 1930 ZZ Model 19R
Blueprint schematic for Zig-Zag Drive
The first advertising campaign was not well received.
The monster prototype, the ZZ 24I, code named The Invulnerable.
The 1930 ZZ 18L
The 1930 ZZ 12R
Cockpit of the ZZ 12R
The driver’s seat of the ZZ 12R
A discreet, high-toned sales campaign succeeded brilliantly.
Newspapers and magazines were full of photos and renderings of the ZZ Model 24’s dramatic (and hideously expensive) Open Book Grille. The car was a Star.
Augustus bought a vast estate in Newport RI with his profits.
The Pinnacle Of Fame. 1933. Time’s Man of the Year in 1932 and 1934 was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Heady company for an undertaker’s son.
Zinsser-Zellbach became obsessed. He had to have that Nobel Prize Cup.
Then the Catastrophe.
The Nobel Literary Ball and the 1934 Cup Winner Luigi Pirandello
Pirandello partied for days, all over Italy, and everywhere else too.
Back in the United States, every Zinsser-Zellbach vehicle, every part, every building, every scrap of documentation was destroyed.
Zinsser-Zellbach was a broken man.
His car was found abandoned in the seaside town of Menton, France.
The interior was neat as a pin. There was no note.
Zellbach’s tuxedo was neatly folded and left behind with his shoes, top hat and stick. Still no note.
The interment drew shock and ridicule.
The belated monument is still a mystery.
The one last ZZ-24 is not utterly destroyed. It is resting but not in peace.
Y’all think you’re new. All a generation or two old and unoriginal. You’re all yesterday’s news and don’t know it. Mostly anticipated in the Sixties. A few hip-hopped in ridicule.
I just love this thing, which bills itself as a Venn Diagram. Found it recently when I was looking for something else. (Sources for it here and here.) It succeeds, I’m sure, beyond its designer’s wildest dreams in depicting the precipice on which our culture now stands, all without mentioning political parties, cell phones, or social networks. This is the rationalist model writ large. All the category names around the perimeter contain overlapping flavors of nonsense sneered at by the professional skeptics who presume to know so much more than the rest of us. It’s impressively voluminous, but that means there are ways in which it is, well, talking too much. I’m going to be spending some time explaining that last statement, but I’m not going to apologize. When a thief tries to sell you a noose, it’s too good an opportunity not to ignore it but to tighten it around his neck.
They flip the Spirit star point to the bottom and replace it with matters of material earthiness. Bracketed by the devil horns we all know and love. I’m not accusing Venn boy of anything, mind. If you want to play with his diagram in this bizarre context, feel free. I’m pretty sure he’s not a Satanist but just a not-too-bright garden variety atheist who knows way more than less than nothing.
Epilogue… Or Prologue…
The 50th Anniversary to Worry About Now
What I saw from the window of a 747. Almost exactly. My wife’s favorite.
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