It wasn’t that late, maybe 10 pm. Heading for the Penn campus sidewalk, we stepped over a chain strung between two buildings. On our right… probably one of the condemned rowhouses; on our left, the Franklin Society Building, home of the Daily Pennsylvanian student newspaper (affectionately, the “DP”). 

Bob held a wine glass. No memory where it came from. Warren was being loud and brash – Warren was always loud and brash. We were tipsy but not, for college students, drunk, just what-the-hell enjoying ourselves. 

We were stopped by a Campus Cop for… not being what we should? In a public place?

The campus police then were not what they (for good or bad) later became – ex-city cops and reasonably savvy criminal-law types. These were low-paid dimwits. They hustled us over to their office in the dorms, where impulsive, whiplash Warren called the city police to come and rescue us from their campus counterparts. A boneheaded move, to say the least, with exactly the result you’d expect. The city cops packed us off to the hoosegow.

Before I entered Penn, the DP had been the longtime captive of one particular campus fraternity – like a literary plumbers’ guild. But during my freshman year (1957) the paper was opened up to all sorts of misanthropes like… me. However, it remained a male-only refuge; the “girls” put out their own insipid weekly. (Full gender parity, gained a few years later, required a change to the DP’s written constitution.)

Our staff was divided into editorial enclaves, only one of which – News – could elevate its members to the top editorships. But I chose Features, an encapsulated mini-mob whose influence was, in theory, confined to Page 2.

But oh, did we make the most of it. By my junior year, Bob and Warren, as co-Features editors, had turned that page into a fire-breathing dragon of possibility. We wrote about centrifugal bumble puppy (try it some time), sneered at fraternities and ran ideationally rampant across the social wasteland at the beginning of the ’60s.

Bob and Warren had little in common, other than being Jewish. Bob (full name Robert Owen Marritz – how did he come to be named after an Irish patriot?) leaned forward and mumbled behind his hand when he spoke. Smart-aleck Warren, whose brother had some executive position in Hollywood, delivered brash pronouncements accompanied by a mental clipboard. Bob retired from a utility in Oregon a few years back, but Warren seems to have vanished from the earth. I liked Bob a lot.

A younger member of the Features staff, Charles, spiffily dressed and snapping rat-a-tat quips, later took a job in the Reagan administration and started drawling like William Buckley.

I became Features editor the following year and wrote a daily column, “Etc.,” which mixed stupid humor, snide commentary, uninformed snorts about architecture, and bizarre short stories. In other words, it was much like all my later newspaper columns – each of which, for no good reason, started with the letter “E” (“The Entertainer,” “Ex Cathedra,” “Epilogue”).

We stitched the DP together on solid little manual typewriters on the third floor of the Franklin Society Building, a long, narrow structure of industrial concrete beams, fronted by a later stack of yellow-brick rooms pasted onto the street side. (Downstairs, massive machinery churned away doing … something.)

The Features office was a small room dominated at the window end by an immense, defunct air conditioner that we came to worship as the god Mah-Sheene. Knowing that the building was scheduled for demolition to make way for the new university library, we began writing on the walls with magic marker. And on the ceiling. And on the floor.

A few friends who, like us, found student politics ripsnortingly ridiculous, established the United Christian Front. A few of their friends formed the Student Anarchist League. The two soon merged as UCF-SAL (pronounced “You-cef-sal”), ran a slate in the annual student election, and got enough votes to wangle the vice-presidency for the above-mentioned Charles.

Something called the Franklin Society, undoubtedly prestigious, had died when whichever fraternity lost its grip on the paper. The Franklin Society Room, in the third-floor front addition, formerly off-limits to mere mortals, had a balcony and a massive leather couch, the most comfortable napping apparatus ever left to wither. At any hour you could find one of our number snug in its exuberant folds and sags, for the DP was an all-encompassing endeavor. At a guess, I spent 50 hours a week at the paper – almost every minute not given to classes or school work. 

Each weekday evening a few of us, on rotation, made our way to the Legal Intelligencer, the ancient and still official publication of court-related doings in Philadelphia. Their night shift printed the DP. The Legal was then a hot-type operation; every line of proto-print was individually set as a lead ingot. Every word of the DP’s immortal copy was proofread by a rock-solid bald-headed guy who never missed a comma and routinely corrected our poorly aimed college-boy grammar. (Would that such wondrous beings still existed in the publishing world.)

But my most enduring memory of the DP is an odor. I always tore up the Franklin Society stairs two or three at a time, stopping only to talk to any fellow staffer cascading down. If it had been raining when I entered, following that momentary encounter I’d move upward though the aromal effusion of my hair. It smelled like a wet sheep.

I was the only journalism major at Penn who was also on the staff of The Daily Pennsylvanian – because I actually wanted to write. Among other effluvia, I wrote movie and theater reviews. This was back when Philly was a major stop for Broadway tryout companies. I reviewed the tryout casts of West Side Story, Gypsy (with Ethel Merman) and The Unsinkable Molly Brown, which featured an inspired lead by an understudy that night. I’ve lost her name; she probably went on to great things.

Still girl-shy and undating in college, I took my mother to the live performances. She’d always had an interest in theater and showed better taste than I did.

It’s odd that I mostly recall reviewing the Broadway musicals. I’m not a musical fan. I find ludicrous the idea of people hurled into goofy or dangerous situations suddenly breaking into song and dance. Weep, call the cops or shoot somebody, for crap’s sake! But West Side Story, Stephen Sondheim’s first, with music by still-emerging Leonard Bernstein, signaled a full-scale break with Broadway tradition. It hit hard.

I don’t recall which movies I reviewed. I guess I could check what was produced during my college years, but I’d rather leave it alone. The DP wasn’t invited to most press screenings (except those for United Artists, held by a local rep with the superb name of Moe Wax); we’d have to buy tickets and get reimbursed. 

Father Divine, who claimed to be God (from his Wikipedia entry: “Federal Bureau of Investigation files record his name as George Baker alias ‘God'”), was a black fundamentalist who established the International Peace Mission Movement in Harlem that advocated integration, celibacy and strict separation of the sexes.

He fled Harlem to avoid a court case in 1942 and lived the remainder of his career in Philadelphia. I’m not sure how many buildings he owned, but the most notable in the city were the Divine Lorraine on north Broad St. (now condos), along with a smaller hotel near the Penn campus. He lived most of the time at his headquarters in a donated mansion in suburban Gladwynne, with secondary headquarters in South Philly. 

At his height, in Harlem, he had followers around the world. By the late ’50s, early ’60s in Philly, he was more legend than substance. No one knew exactly when or where he was born, or (despite the “George Baker” reference) his given name. He might as well have been God. 

I don’t recall if we, as student journalists, were invited to one of his “banquets” in South Philly, but I assume so, though that seems odd. We sat at an immense rectangular table in a huge room. The “hotel’s” inhabitants – men and women lived on separate floors – filled the table and lined the walls to listen to Father Divine’s taped sermon. 

I was impressed to see these people, so many looking physically or emotionally damaged, who had been saved from the streets, given a room, meals and some meaning to their lives. Throughout his career, Father D. provided for the poor and the marginal, regardless of race. Though inflated stories shrieked of orgies and fraud – such shrieks always to be expected – he seems to have done a great deal of good. 

That evening, the taped sermon, along with exhortations from a lieutenant or two, whipped his followers into a near ecstasy of anticipation for his appearance at the table: At least two women leaning against the wall went into orgasm. But then, alas… Father would not make it down tonight.

In point of fact, he had not been seen in public for some years, though his place at the head of the table was always set. Some rumors claimed he was dead, his body kept in secret, others that he was 105 and decrepit. Officially, he died in 1965, probably in his late 80s.

Though Father could not attend the dinner physically, Mother Divine sat by his invisible side. With shouts of glory from the room, goddam! there she was – a honey blonde in her 30s from Toronto, drop-dead gorgeous. Yes – God gets the goodies. Not only beautiful, she exuded a calming charm that quieted the ecstasy and smoothed us into a fine meal.

At the hotel near Penn, perhaps 15 years later, a cafeteria off the lobby served remarkably cheap meals to anyone who entered and showed proper behavior. A photo of Mother Divine, her picture-flesh now sepia tinted, hung across from the serving counter.

A lot of them, right?

But here I’m concentrating on how, in multiple areas, we suffer from unnecessary and almost inexplicable “design failures.”

Some minor examples:

1) Linda bought a clutch of “flexible scrapers” to remove duck fat and other delights from the bowls and containers to which they adhere. The damned things are so flexible it’s like trying to use a fly-swatter to reshape the universe.

2) Scrubber sponges. Those things you buy in 2 or 4 packs, more often than not Scotch-Brite brand. When I was growing up, anything made by 3M – Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing – was a guarantee of quality. Scotch was their most solid public brand: think Scotch Tape, etc. Now, Scotch-Brite, their leading brand of sponge, is a surefire pointer to a total piece of shit. The silly scrubber, minimally adhering to the sponge, peels away within a week, at which point the sponge begins to disintegrate like a badly spiced mummy. How the great have fallen.

Larger examples:

3) Highway intersections. Maybe this is something specific to Pennsylvania, though I find that hard to believe. About 10 years back, several perfectly adequate and simply arranged intersections, where one two-way road either dead-ended into another or separated to accommodate right and left turns, were suddenly redesigned with arcane extra lanes and lines of upright narrow posts that face entering traffic like the teeth of a prehistoric beast.

Previously, coming out of Towanda (about 20 miles north us), where the exit road ends at US 220, you simply stopped and waited for the 90-degree opposing traffic to… cease opposing, then you turned left or right. Now you’re presented with an undefined mishmash of tangled absurdity and no directions about how or why you should proceed.

4) Mall layout and parking. Despite the fact that almost all malls have the same agglomeration of nationally recognized companies, interspersed with smaller local outfits that just hope for the best, there is no common design for how traffic moves, how parking is arranged, or any obvious way to exit the miasma of adversarial auto sprawls. After decades of regimented consumerism, how is there not even an accepted range of designs for how you lay out a fucking mall?

5) Phone answering systems. Do I even have to go into this? I called our doctor’s office to cancel an appointment because the roads looked impassible. I went through two levels of “push button #1,” which led me to hold, during which, within under two minutes, I got three different inane, mendacious messages telling me how important my call was. At which point I hung up. 

An hour later, the same doc’s office called to tell me the doc couldn’t make it in either. I told her the voicemail was the worst I’d ever run across. She told me that the parent healthcare outfit, 40 miles up the road, had changed everything to central appointment scheduling – which, as I assume we all know, is always a disaster. 

So. With at least 2/3 of the world dependent on all these material and system designs, some intertwined, many apparently independent, why do none of them work even semi-competently?

Some suggestions:

1) Poor design-course design: Whoever is tutoring the current generation of designers – whether they be digital or physical designers – are flubbing The principles of use and usefulness have gotten lost behind overweening assumptions of how such things should be done in an ideal, isolated universe. Or simply to make immediate profit at the expense of utility.

2) Perhaps a subset of the above: Products, processes and overviews are being designed for designers, not users. Design has become a closed system that only talks to itself, concerned with only how the article is put together, not what it’s good for.

3) Similarly, what’s happened to beta-testing: Once – especially with digital design – you assembled a group of users to test your product while still in design phase; they gave you feedback that improved it from the user standpoint. Today, untested phone systems, websites and entire information tableaux are tossed on the market as finished products; their failures and inadequacies are left to be uncovered by the poor slobs saddled with a malbirthed child.

4) A more specific example: I can’t prove this, but it’s visually obvious that the new traffic intersections are designed from above. In other words, the designers are using a CAD program that presents a 2-D representation of a ground plan, so you’re looking down on the intersection. Theoretically, you can thus observe how traffic merges and meshes so that you can plan the most direct and obvious way for it to come together for everyone’s benefit.

But as a driver moving into an intersection, you aren’t experiencing a detached helicopter perspective, you’re moving into a 3-D tangle of helter-skelter elements that aid or (more often) impede your progress. 

5) The political/economic reality: What grants are available to do what? What benefits will they bring into your area? This is a determining aspect (perhaps the determining aspect) of modern public design: Who will pay for what we might want to accomplish, what will they demand, how will this affect jobs, what are the constraints, what will we not be allowed to do?

We are captives of the moment. As humans, as mammals, as living beings, we are and have always been captives of the moment. But the current moment has become increasingly, confusingly complex. Well – that’s progress! But progress increasingly divorced from lived reality.

I have no answer for this or any of the other miasmic problems of our teeming human society. But we should all do our damnedest to at least uncover what the range of possible answers might look like. 

We are not the victims of life, neither are we enlightened viewers of the universal. We are limited yet entwined viewers of “what’s out there.” We each make our own assumptions of what that might, at core, possibly be. But we should never curtail our inquisitiveness, or lower our guard against insubstantial assumptions. 

These comments may well seem to fall outside the stream of what I was supposedly talking about above. But I don’t think so.

Anyone who knows much of anything about the history of mathematics knows the name Cantor. He was one of the math geniuses of all time. Being neither a math genius nor a math competent, I couldn’t tell you precisely what he accomplished, what he was most noted for, what difference he made in the intellectual world.

So I’m talking about a different Cantor, who taught me calculus, who… I barely know what to say. One of the 2 or 3 best teachers I’ve ever been exposed to, and one of the most sad, most riddled people I’ve known.

While looking into the background of my friend Dave Liberman (who died way, way too early), I stumbled over a site listing the prizewinners for best freshman math paper presented at UPenn. Not surprisingly, Dave (first  in his class the year he graduated) had won in 1960. I also noticed that five years previously, that freshman prize had been shared by Robert Cantor. 

In the summer of 1964, at Penn, a year after I’d snuck back from a disastrous term studying truly dumb shit in grad school communications at Stanford, I steamrollered through organic chem, elementary biochemistry and calculus.

That first summer semester, it was my enormous good fortune to have Cantor as grad-student instructor. Scrawny, obviously shy, he stood at the front of the room in rolled-up shirt sleeves, a 3×5 notebook cupped in his hand throughout each session. He wrote equations on the board, copying from the tiny booklet, then asked for student questions, which he answered in specific, evolving detail. If the student remained perplexed, Cantor would provide yet more detail. I never saw him leave a student without a complete, convincing answer to a question.

At the end of his thoroughgoing course, he gave a five-hour final exam – using the exam as yet another vehicle for instruction. The next day, he held an optional meeting to discuss the exam in detail – what it was doing, what it was intended to do – what it taught. At least 90% of the class showed up for the review.

The course was an illuminating educational experience, exactly what learning should be about.

The Penn math department at the time was known for using its grad students like chattel, cleaning up research for the mahoffs who refused to release them to finish their degrees. So, assuming Cantor got his undergrad degree in ’58, he’d been tunneling through the department for at least 6 years by the time I took his course.

Two years later, he left home with a note paper-clipped to his shirt pocket that read, “I am not who I am.” He walked into the Penn math department where he shot two of the profs and himself. He and one of the profs died.

Such things are all too common these days. They weren’t then.

Cantor was not a madman. He was a dedicated, caring, downtrodden human being. Once, while I was working at the Penn bookstore, he stopped in to buy a newspaper. I said Hello. It was like offering a piece of bread to a deer. He barely knew how to respond.

I should at least have asked him how things were going for him. I’m sure it would not have changed any future outcome, but I missed a chance to thoroughly acknowledge a human being I admired, and who probably never fully realized his own worth.

Screenplay: Tentative title : “The End”

Opens with the world in disintegration (in other words, the world of today): climate decimation, wildfires, floods, pan-academics, cows farting methane, Brazillians whacking down trees, the US run in dictatorship by Stump, England slavering over Clown Johnson, Bangladeshis three-feet under water, reindeer eating plastic, plastic eating reindeer.

Noble underground scientist outcasts (1/2 women, 1/3 minorities) battle heroically to stem the tide of destruction as eruptions of pus and putrescence foul them.

The chaos is quelled, the traumatized two-year-old snuggles to her mother’s soot-stained breast.

As the John Williams soundtrack swells and quivers, the reformed teenage badass son points to the sky: “What’s that?’

The heroic father: “Not… the asteroid?”

All: “Oh fuck!”

*    *    *    *

A song for those who prefer 18th century chemistry

Phlo gently, sweet giston,

Flow out of this log.

For 2000 years

You lay dead in a bog.

But now I’ve set fire,

To both our delight.

Flow gently sweet gi-i-i-iston,

Burn into the night.

*    *    *    *

Nordic limerick

There was an old man of Gdansk,

Who stumbled around in a dance.

He said with a quaver,

“I ask you this favor,

“Drop no fire ants down my pants.”

*    *    *    *

Two men sat on a log. There was room for a third, but he had gone into town to purchase beer.

“This is a good, solid log,” said the first man.

“Ay-up,” said the second.

“Do you think there are many logs this good and solid?”

“Ay-up.”

“Do you think, if we piled them all high enough, we could reach heaven?”

“Ay-up.”

“What time is it?”

“How the fuck would I know?”

The third man returned with two sick-packs of an unknown IPA. None of them liked it.

*    *    *    *

Socrates’ butt itched.

“What the matter?” asked Plato.

“My butt itches,” said Socrates.

“Ah,” said Plato.

*    *    *    *

Thomas prodded the Lord’s side: 

“Why 12 apostles?”

“What d’ya mean?”

“Why not 15?”

“That’s not an even number.”

“It’s not even a number?”

“No, you dickhead, it’s not divisible by two.”

“Most things aren’t, unless you have a great big sword.”

“Has anyone told you how dumb you are?”

“Many.”

“Manny? Manny who?”

It went on that way for awhile.

*    *    *    *

An ancient man sat under a tree and wondered in what year he had been born. He was old enough that he had forgotten his childhood, then his middle age, then his later years, and now, yesterday. He leaned against the tree trunk and thought, but nothing significant transpired.

A squirrel chittered down the tree and sat on his belt buckle. It looked up at the old man and felt a deep, harrowing sadness. What does a squirrel need of sadness? It wasn’t a need, it was a calling.

The ancient man looked at the squirrel, wondering at first why it was there, then retrieving a memory. “I’ve met you before,” he said.

“No,” said the squirrel, “but possibly one of my ancestors.”

“I’ve never met my ancestors,” said the old man, “except my parents. I suppose they are ancestors, of a sort.”

The squirrel clawed his way up the man’s shirt. “No man, no woman, no human, has ever mated with a squirrel.”

The man laughed. “Can you say this with certainty?”

“I can say nothing with certainty.”

The man gave the squirrel a pistachio from his pocket and set out again on the trail.

“Tomorrow,” he said to the hemlock branches, “tomorrow I will have the answer.”

*    *    *    *

How many piglets will fit in a wormhole?

“It depends,”said Stephen Hawking while being fed a croissant, “where the wormhole exits.”

*    *    *    *

Leonardo da Vinci was cleaning the spaces between his toes with a small twig. On the hillside across from him fed a flock of… what? Sheep? His tired eyes could not focus. Goats?

He put down the twig and stood to investigate. A loud noise came from the direction he had just left. An animal? No, a machine of his own invention. The sound had not existed in all the world until he had made the machine in his mind and then transferred it to paper. “Well!” he said, with enthusiasm, but not pride. His inventions would never be, so it was said, merely extrapolations.

He trod across the road. He had neglected to return his sandals to his feet but was unconcerned. 

“If there was a way,” he considered, “if there was a way…”

But of course there wasn’t.

There were neither sheep nor goats, but a tiny, withered man in a shambled riding coat. Leonardo considered the man, the coat, the hillside, the circumstance.

He went home to paint.

How weird to be 82 years old and suddenly (that’s stupid, nothing is “sudden” at 82) to realize you’ve found something that you should have known years back. More than years: from the beginning.

I don/t know what that thing is. Maybe it’s honesty. I’ve pretended to be honest most of my life, but that’s the biggest lie. What I thought was honesty was a sideways shift of pretend. So it may be something else, but it’s something open, inviting. From someone who has seldom been inviting.

So what does such crap mean? As usual, I don’t know. Been listening tonight to hours of Lucinda Williams (do you know her? she’s country, not what you might think of as country, in the sense of blanded-out emotion strung on a telephone wire; no, she does it, the real honesty).

I’m sitting here at the uncaring computer, typing, knowing in my scattered mind that what I tap out will never be the same as tapping at that Olympia typewriter in the ‘70s, when I typed and the machine answered with its clicks (computers don’t answer, they lie silent or snicker).

I seldom admit this,

especially now, but I want to do something monumental. I mean, something so enormous that it will never be forgotten. This is particularly unsubstantiatable because I believe that a) I’m too limited to do it, or b) it doesn’t matter, or c) there’s nothing monumental in the universe, or d) (most likely) that life is a lie that can’t be particulated into a breakdown that tells us what matters and what doesn’t.

Tomorrow morning I’ll likely (almost certainly) wake with mental pain – the certainty that if I don’t get up I’ll lie there and suffer paralyzing negativity without reason, but if I do get up it will be just another day that will flop along with nothing to distinguish it – or worse, that distinguishing means nothing.

Oh, that’s not as negative as it sounds (is it?), just that the world’s flowing like a malignant plasma down humanity’s last-possible mountainside. We’re not at the bottom, no – we’re our own chosen obliteration.

Too often I think that’s exactly what it should be. (Oh, I’m a bad person. Or one too realistic to be here.)

• Pumpkin spice: I’ve never had it, would never want it, but how did the idea of pumpkin flavoring in your coffee possibly come about? You carved your pumpkin into a jack-o’lantern, made pie from the filling – that was it! Anybody puts that crap in my Yukon Jack, they’re in mighty big trouble.

• Oatmeal in soap: Not Cream of Wheat or Lucky Charms or Raisin Bran soap. Does it just have to be breakfast? Bacon-and-egg soap, English-muffin soap, hash-brown soap.

• “Dead as a doornail”: OK, this one’s a cheat, because I do know it goes back to at least the 14th century in English poetry. And of course doornails are dead – a live one would be pretty scary (“Ma, the doornail bit my ass!”). But I maintain, without formal proof, that the expression arises from the fact that after a doornail is pounded through the pieces of wood you join together, the point of the nail is hammered flat – a process of “deadening” the nail. So, a doornail, in place, was and is dead(ened).

• Blind Lemon Jefferson: But no Blind Orange Pekoe?

• “Our number-one priority,” as claimed by corporations and politicians who have no sense of priority beyond power or profit.

• “Unacceptable” and “inappropriate,” as terms applied equally to poor counter service and genocide.

• Egg in beer: Really? Really? Who in hell?

• The revival of vinyl records: I grew up with and loved LPs, but the continuing annoyance of trying to keep dirt out of the grooves (couldn’t), adjusting the needle weight, and futzing with the player’s self-minded innards took more patience that I’ll ever have. Today, I can slip a CD into the slot and it plays, without the background grinding of a slow landslide. At my age, my hearing’s gone to hell, so I’m losing more frequencies then dimes under the bureau, and I may be wrong (I was once), but I think the “more natural” sound of vinyl is largely a delusion of nostalgia. I have intense nostalgia for singers I’ve heard and watched who have died, but not for creaky technology that’s been supplanted by something easier, cleaner and more dependable to use (though I do miss the elaborate liner notes). Likewise, I love looking at and fondling old plumbing, but to install a new line and expect the water to flow rather than leak, I go with plastic tubing and SharkBite fittings.

• “FRIB”: This is the acronym for the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, at the University of Michigan, a new particle accelerator. I thought: “Wow, will they really say it “frib”? No, they pronounce it “eff-rib”. That’s damned disappointing, since most research scientists have a wild sense of humor. But… anyway, it should really be “ffrib” – which is likely a Welsh beetle.

• Signs for “Trucks Entering Highway”: I should be surprised? Isn’t that what trucks do?

• Mineral spirits: I was using some to dilute a spill of hydraulic fluid from my log splitter, and I wondered: With the growing idea that everything in the universe has consciousness, there must be room for spirit mediums who reach out to minerals.

*    *    *    *

I don’t think I finished Kerouac’s On the Road or anything else of his, just I just don’t relate to him at all. Odd that with the poetry-reading group that the Friends of the Library here set up, I finally got into Ferlinghetti (about a month before he died at 101) and love much of his work, especially the humor. The rest of the Beat poets have affected me about as much as Kerouac.

Growing up in and into the ‘50s, my life was often hell, but a very different – personal, hardly societal – hell. I knew nothing of drugs or dissolution, only alienation – not from society, but all of life. There have been lots of self-revelatory books out (I’ve read none of them) about growing up with this or that perceived mental or social disturbance (skin color, sexual orientation, autism, depression, abuse, etc.), but I haven’t heard about anything that describes how I saw (didn’t at all see) myself as a child: as someone outside the world, someone who knew none of the rules of existence, who lived in terror of everything human. That’s, I suppose, an exaggeration or I wouldn’t be here today, but it’s something that after 8 decades I still can’t adequately express: the constant terror of being.

Some disordered thoughts about the rush to electric cars:

• Electric vehicles may produce “zero emissions” at the tailpipe, but that “green” electricity doesn’t arrive by magic. The emissions take place at the generation plant. While coal is fading as the fuel for generation (in the U.S., not in  China and India), it’s been replaced mostly by natural gas – another fossil fuel.

• If instead we assume that all electricity can be generated by solar or wind energy, how do we sustainably produce the massive quantity of generation components, such as solar panels or wind turbine blades?

• Local solar power is unrealistic in places like ours in the northern Pennsylvania woods – we’ve looked into this.

• Similarly, what about the sourcing and production of the batteries, etc. necessary for electric cars?

• Current dependence on lithium-ion batteries requires quantities of lithium that may be beyond possible production if cars go all-electric.

• Lithium mining is already devastating the environments in countries such as Peru, Chile, China (and now Portugal!).

• Most lithium-ion batteries also require cobalt and manganese, which are in more limited supply than lithium.

• All these battery materials are difficult and expensive to recycle; recycling is not yet close to being sustainable.

• So basically, we need a new, more efficient battery design.

• Taken together, subsidies to support electric cars at this point could be as disastrous as the subsidies given to promote biofuels:

• Instead of sawgrass and weeds providing biofuels, as originally foreseen, corn has become the major biofuel source.

• Much if not most American corn now goes to feed cars rather than people or crop animals.

• The remaining native prairies in the U.S. are being devastated by expanded corn production.

• Activists at COP26 have called to move away from cars, and instead make cities and towns more amenable to walking, cycling and public transport. This is an encouraging approach but unlikely to take hold worldwide in the near future.

*    *    *    *

We cannot approach the climate crisis realistically as long as we maintain a population of 8 billion humans. We’re animals – particularly dirty ones. Even if we eliminate meat from our diet, thus reducing methane and other feed-animal pollutants, we can’t sustainably feed our population without turning almost all arable land to food production, which is already destroying diversity and eliminating natural open land. Soo… we need to reduce our population – rapidly. How?

I can think of numerous ways, none pleasant or ethical.

*    *    *    *

I don’t share complaints I’ve read about billionaires shooting themselves into space—as long as they stay there.

I don’t know if college English classes still bring up this distinction when teaching 18th-century lit, but I remember how Jonathan Swift was presented as someone who loved individuals but hated humanity, with Alexander Pope seen as the opposite, a difficult if not impossible friend, who firmly believed in humanity’s worth and the cosmic outlook (“Whatever is, is right”).

As much as any of us is one or the other, I think I’m definitely in the Swiftian realm. Not that I like everybody indiscriminately (hell no!), but that, while delighted with my friends and fond of most acquaintances, I see humanity as pretty much a slopheap. Pete Seeger, on the other hand, from what little I know of him personally, seemed the opposite, his songs rife with uplift and hope but possessing an ability to piss off the people who dealt with him (though how he or anyone could end up a committed Stalinist is incomprehensible).

What does this prove? Not a damned thing, except maybe that we’re all just who we are, little of it makes objective sense, and individual human complexity can’t be sorted out through generalized claims.

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I have this almost unholy admiration for Greta Thunberg and the other young protestors today – especially the women. Most of them started fighting the idiocy of the world in their early to mid teens. Back in my (thankfully unnamed) generation (early ‘60s), it was college students, mostly male, who ignited or supported the national anti-war and integrationist movements. I’m hoping that the current youth group has more tenacity and better shelf-life than ours.

So many ’60s stars came a-cropper (Abbie Hoffman by suicide, Jerry Rubin by becoming yet another millionaire, Rap Brown from SNCC ending up a bank robber, the Weather Underground turning to pointless, fatal sabotage). That old mob failed beyond the immediate effect of halting the Vietnam war and aiding the limping start of integration. Zero Population Growth – needed now more that ever – vanished almost without a trace as the earth’s population swelled to beyond 8 billion of us destructive little buggers; and once Vietnam was down the tubes, marching for demilitarization and societal change (along with the support for unions) disappeared for most of the succeeding half century. 

I never marched for anything (I seldom even hike), so I have no right to complain, and I don’t for the most part. I’d rather celebrate what seems a genuine resurgence of caring. That it had to come as the expense of endless Black deaths, social brutality and mindless environmental destruction only underlines my sense of hopelessness for humanity as a viable conglomerate.

But maybe we can at least have (somewhere, should there remain a world left to incorporate them), small enclaves of decency, acceptance and cooperation. These “kids” on the front lines, holding their elders’ feet to the fire, embody that hope, realistic or not.

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Why does Thump still retain a “base” of supporters, despite being a vile and vicious human being? Because they accept him as their model – he cheats, he lies, he denigrates those who oppose him and degrades those who grovel to him – exactly what these supporters would do if they were in his place, and they know it. “Base” is the right word – not for those who admire his few (but never implemented) “policies” – but for those who embrace his evil as the proper basis of existence. Though philosophy has never successfully defined “the good,” for most of us there are some pretty widely accepted designations of evil. We’ve lived through and with a lot of them in recent years.

Though Crumpet is often compared it Hitler, he’s really much closer to Goebbels (with less than half Goebbels’ mind). Goebbels invented the idea of continual promotion of the Big Lie through use of modern media – that if you lie often and consistently across all channels, the lie will be accepted as the truth. This approach became (and remains) the basis of nearly all modern advertising and politics, but Chump has returned it to its purest foundations: never retreat, never admit a mistake, ignore all inconvenient facts and champion the worst outcome. 

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Bumper sticker suggestion:

Rump/Penis ’24

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Europe stole this country from it’s native population.

Then our government stole Florida from Spain and Texas from Mexico.

For god’s sake, give them back!