Saturday, May 18, 2024

Our Big Chill

(Ann Arbor expats gathered in my apartment in the Fillmore District of San Francisco in the early '70s.)

I was born in Detroit two years after the end of World War II. My family moved into one of the city’s expanding suburbs, Royal Oak, amidst a cluster of other families that consisted of returning soldiers, wives and boys and girls named David, Susan, Bill, Bob, Jim, Mark, Bonnie, Nancy, Kathy, Fred, Peter, Carole, Paul, Diane, Mary, John, and so on and so forth.

We were the leading edge of the Baby Boom generation -- a cohort so large that we broke every institution we encountered. When we got to school, there were never enough classrooms, chairs, desks, books, or other resources. Teachers suddenly had to handle many more students at once than had previously been the case.

When we reached our teens, there simply was not enough beat in the music that our parents and older siblings enjoyed. Thus, the mass market for rock and roll was born.

Meanwhile, the political economy of the nation newly victorious in the second war of wars dictated that America become an empire, as all conquerors since time immemorial have done. 

As we grew up, America's capitalist empire -- imperialistic, arrogant, and driven by opposition to communism -- spread globally.

We were served books like "Our Friend the Atom," a distinctly propagandistic reader that was our government's attempt to convince us, years before we could vote, of the rightness of its policy to develop nuclear weapons to protect us from the Russians, Chinese, and other socialistic foreigners.

Much of the rest of my generation's story is written contemporaneously in music, in poetry, in film, and in our collective memory. Confronted with the worldview that our fate was to conquer the world, many of us rebelled, begging to differ. 

We opposed the war in Vietnam. We marched in support of the civil rights movement. We launched the modern women's liberation movement and the gay liberation movement. We smoked dope and dropped acid and danced in the streets. We flocked to the nascent environmental movement.

We were idealists and cynics, hippies and radicals. For our guides, we had Dylan and the Beatles, the Stones, and so many more. The music always reflected us as the ragged edges of a churning chainsaw that sliced our way through society trying to establish a new way of being.

Did we succeed in doing that? Probably not. Progress requires struggle and there have been many setbacks. The culture wars rage. It often looks bleak but three-quarters of a century later, many of us are still trying.

(I published the first version of this essay in 2006.)

HEADLINES:

 

at No comments:

Friday, May 17, 2024

Lie v. Lie

 

After monitoring the 2016 election interference trial of Donald Trump for the past several weeks, I have no clue whether he’ll be convicted or not.

The media shorthand for the case — the “hush money” trial — is misleading, as is much of the coverage of the actual issue at hand.

Prosecutors brought the case under a legal theory that Trump had filed false business documents in furtherance of a conspiracy to prevent exposure of his relationship with porn star Stormy Daniels from becoming public at a time that it might have hurt his chances in the 2016 election.

He is almost certainly guilty; common sense and a great deal of circumstantial evidence supports the prosecution theory.

The problem is proving it, as the key witness against Trump is a convicted liar, Michael Cohen. Then again Trump also is a liar, on a far grander scale and with far greater consequences than Cohen.

So what we have here is a small little man who lies compulsively facing off against a gargantuan figure who lies compulsively.

One spent time to jail for his lies, the other is the purported Republican nominee for President who may well end up in jail, at least briefly.

Mad magazine would have had a field day with this one.

HEADLINES:

at No comments:

Thursday, May 16, 2024

Treasure

During my first divorce, as I moved my stuff in my car to a friend’s house across town, everything got jumbled together in boxes, so it was hard to sort out. A month later, I moved again, this time to another house where I would spend most of the coming year.

Slowly, as I settled in, I unpacked the boxes and sorted through old letters and books, some reaching back to my childhood. My oldest son, then about eight, had just become a big baseball fan, rooting for the Giants, playing little league, and collecting baseball cards. I told him about my own card collection back in the Fifties, when I was around his age.

He came over to spend the night one Saturday and I dug through my boxes to see whether any baseball-related stuff had survived the many moves I'd made since childhood. Out tumbled an old scrapbook, circa 1958, with prime baseball cards of legendary stars including Willy Mays, Jackie Robinson, Mickey Mantle and Ted Williams, among others, glued inside.

He gasped. Collectively, these old cards might be worth a small fortune! We were both looking for positive signs that our future might turn out to be brighter than it appeared to be at that time, so this was potentially good news.

This was long before the likes of eBay, so I checked directly with collectors, who explained the cards might be valuable assuming they could be removed from the scrapbook without damaging them.

Alas, upon further investigation it turned out that removing them would destroy them. So we just left them in the place where had I pasted them all those decades ago. 

We still loved having them and he would show them to friends when they came over. Eventually, I realized the real value they had was they helped us create a memory of a special moment together. And that’s much better than money anyway.

(This is from 2006.)

HEADLINES:

 

at No comments:

Wednesday, May 15, 2024

Fearing Technology

 Ever since humans began devising advanced technologies, a significant subset of society has expressed reservations about them. Historians note that technophobia emerged in the early decades of the Industrial Revolution in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.

As a young journalist in the 1970s, I covered the anti-nuke movement, which relied heavily on technophobia, and my own work about pesticides, Circle of Poison, inspired anti-technology feelings as well.

My personal opinions about nuclear energy and pesticides were always more mixed. Having grown up among farmers, I knew how hard they had to work to grow their crops, and how much they welcomed any tool, including chemicals, that eased that struggle.

In fact, “Circle of Poison” had much more to do with the hypocrisy of sending banned pesticides to Third World countries than it did with pesticides per se.

But in the course of researching “Circle,” I came to appreciate that the traditional methods of rotating crops, natural pests and other organic farming techniques were much better because they preserved the long-term viability of soil for sustainable agriculture into the future.

By contrast, the chemical-intensive methods that relied on fertilizers and pesticides not only were polluting the soil, air, water and foods in our farmlands, they were spurring resistance in pests and threatening our future ability to feed ourselves.

Accordingly, I developed a strong aversion to pesticides on ecological grounds, as opposed to a knee-jerk negative reaction based on technophobia. I came to think of it as an evidence-based opposition.

Nuclear power was a slightly different matter, but without the ability to store its wastes, it too was an ecological negative. For me, California’s Prop 15 in 1976 was the turning point, which I covered for Rolling Stone.

These days, I think about those experiences when I consider artificial intelligence. Society is once again split between those who are enthusiastic about the potential of AI (including its potential to produce profits) and those who fear it basically on principle.

I again have mixed feelings. As with pesticides and nuclear power, AI may represent a great step forward or it could lead us to disaster.

Almost certainly, as we get more familiar with AI, the best course will be a third way between enthusiasm and fear— embracing it but subjecting it to careful regulation like with pesticides and nuclear power, albeit in both cases imperfectly. There will be mistakes along the way with AI, like with nukes and pesticides, so let’s just hope this time they once again don’t prove fatal.

(I first published a version of this piece a year ago.)

HEADLINES:

at No comments:

Tuesday, May 14, 2024

Cashing In Memories



The other night at 11:30 I got a text message from another part of the house —it turns out we had a “tooth fairy situation” on our hands. Did I happen to have any cash? 

I checked my wallet but this was the second such request in a week (I’d forgotten that kids of a certain age lose teeth in bunches) and the first one had claimed my last four dollar bills. 

Those had lingered in my wallet for an unknown amount of time because sometime during the epidemic I stopped carrying cash. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but everything I bought was online and my credit cards or PayPal were the only options.

For decades before that I had always kept cash on hand; maybe it was the lingering influence of my Scottish grandparents or maybe my general distrust of credit as a way of financing life’s demands.

In any event, as I rummaged through my possessions. hoping I’d locate a secret stash of a few dollars or large coins somewhere or another, I came upon an old wooden box crafted by my great grandfather in Scotland in the 1880s.

My mother had given it to me when I was a boy and I used it to save old coins people gave me as payment for their newspaper subscriptions in my years working as a paperboy.

Inside it are things like nickels with buffalos and dimes with the Statue of Liberty and aluminum pennies from World War Two. There are old fashioned quarters and silver dollars from the 1920s — coins almost never seen now but still common in my youth.

Then I spied several folded up bills at the bottom of the box. These turned out to be the real treasure because they were old Francs and Reichsmarks from the 1940s. These were collected by my Dad at the end of the war when he was in Europe for the only time in his life.

As I was handling these old wrinkled bills, I was struck by how it is often the tiny things we have later in life that hold true meaning because they can unlock a memory.

Those bills hold real value for me because they once were my Dad’s and I miss him.

***

While I was lost in my musings, I’d almost forgotten abut the Tooth Fairy. Luckily, due to some spare change located elsewhere in the house, this story has a happy ending.

HEADLINES:

 

at No comments:

Monday, May 13, 2024

Daisy's Gymnastics Show




 

at No comments:

The Warrior



(Photo by Dan Noyes)

On Saturday, an eclectic group of people gathered in Berkeley to tell stories about the late writer Kate Coleman. She died last month at the age of 81 and this event marked a celebration of her life and work.

Before the ceremony started, I spotted Tom Orloff, the former D.A. of Alameda County in the crowd, and asked him about one of Kate’s main obsessions during her years as a freelance journalist — the Betty Van Patter murder case.

It will be 50 years this December since Betty, a bookkeeper for the Black Panther Party, went missing from a bar in Berkeley — weeks later her body was found in the Bay.

“I’m afraid there won’t be justice in her case unless there’s a deathbed confession,” Orloff told me. “We had enough evidence to feel certain that it was the Panthers who had killed her, but never enough evidence to try any specific individuals.”

That the Van Patter case was never brought to trial was a great frustration to Kate up until the end of her life. The last time I visited her, although she was suffering from dementia and didn’t remember who I was, she recalled the details of the case with a great deal of clarity. 

Betty’s daughter, Tamara Baltar, lives on the east coast. Earlier last week, when I told her that I would be attending the celebration of Kate’s life, Tamara wrote me: “I owe a debt of gratitude to Kate because of her pursuit of the truth about what happened to my mother, No matter what, she always pursued her investigations and published the discoveries she made along the way…Katie never gave up.”

If old journalists and prosecutors are still talking about Betty’s case, that is largely due to Kate’s persistence. Maybe that’s why my conversation with Orloff felt in its own way like a fitting tribute to her and her relentless drive in all matters.

And come to think of it, perhaps that should be her epitaph: “Katie never gave up.”

(You can read a ten-part series on the Betty Van Patter case here.)

HEADLINES:

at No comments:

Sunday, May 12, 2024

Memorial for Kate Coleman

Dan Seth & Lowell
Talking with Tom Orloff

 With George

at No comments:

Weekend Links

HEADLINES:

 

at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)