Future Footnotes

Footnotes to a Book About the Future that I Abandoned Several Years Ago*

*In 2011, to be exact. These footnotes, found below leaping from the runaway sentences they were born from, were probably the best parts of a series of hybrid essays, part journalism, part memoir, about the year 2050. I could never shape the darn thing into a coherent whole, maybe because the book was less about that particular year – I mean, really, who knows? – than about the idea of the future and what it means from personal and philosophical perspectives. Given that I had no “platform,” in publisher-speak, as either a philosopher or futurist, the project was a long shot. And it didn’t come in.

Please note the bonus, new material from July, 2016: blissfully short footnotes to the footnotes to the abandoned book! It’s fun to see how things have changed, or not.

Oh, one more thing. Here are some background details about the author that may clarify matters: my age – 55; brothers and sisters – four; mother – elderly, in nursing home; father – alcoholic, died when I was 15; wife – Elahna; daughter – Kelsey, age 26. I got divorced from her mother when she was five. Also I teach at a college in Boston, write stuff, garden, like Star Trek, enjoy hiking, etc. I worry, yet life’s good. Okay, here goes –

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(from page 6) The year 2050 has acquired a totemic quality as a marker, a dateline, a kind of historical crossroads.*

*Like 2050 is now, 1984 was much anticipated then. Its arrival has since become celebrated for not ushering in the Orwellian world of Nineteen Eighty-four – or so says the monolithic mass media directing us how to think and feel and behave. The year 2000 fascinated fans of Nostradamus who believed that the cosmos would collapse at midnight of the new millennium, as well as technologists who predicted a Y2K global computer glitch meltdown. An internet-powered cult has lately formed around 2012 as the Doomsday Year, based on dubious interpretations of the Mayan Long Count calendar which ends – just ends! – on December 21, 2012. Plus there’s a very loud movie, 2012, by the same dudes who blew up the White House in Independence Day, and haven’t you read the psychedelic future history, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, in which we stand at “the juncture between one world and the next,” according to the book’s author Daniel Pinchbeck. He admits to not knowing if the next world will be a famine-torn hell or “a new planetary culture based on empathy.” The latter would be nice.*

*Why did I tease poor Pinchbeck? Maybe he’s right; maybe we are hitting an historical inflection point in which muddling along won’t cut it anymore. 2050, btw, is still trotted out in 2016 as the measuring milestone for the future, for no reason other than its nice roundedness. Also, its digits add up to seven and G-d took seven days; hmmm…

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(page 8) David asked me why the POW on the cover of my book Journey out of Darkness looked like me. His face, like mine. The comparison shocked me, in fact, but for some reason I just laughed and nodded. Yeah, that’s crazy, isn’t it?*

*When I returned from San Francisco, I looked closely at the man on the cover of Journey Out of Darkness. Yes, he does resemble me – the me of 25-30 years ago, the screwed-up college me. The man’s eyes are so sad and vacant that it’s unnerving. Do I still look that way sometimes? The answer, alas, is yes. Another weird thing about the photo: this American POW is wearing a German naval cap; where’d that come from?*

*Was the cap screw-up an omen? And a strange omen, indeed, if this American POW is a member of the German navy. After Journey came out in 2007, I expected to publish more books but the future thing capsized and the project about hiking the length of Israel is stuck because I haven’t finished the Negev Desert segment due to heart problems and my Cold War book is still notes and no wonder those eyes are so sad and vacant…maybe I should go to Germany, see the Wall, Berlin, the land where the POWs were starved…take a train to Auschwitz and the bloodlands…do some kind of penance…is that what the cap means?

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(page 10) Sure, thinking ahead is prudent – toting an umbrella,* building a college or retirement fund, keeping your job skills current, sliding a dime in the leather slot of your penny loafer just in case you get stranded and need to make a phone call, as my mother did in her Depression-era girlhood – but excessive concentration on the future can be a wearying pursuit, devoid of spontaneity, and a convenient excuse for avoiding present responsibilities, opportunities, and horrors.

*Isn’t it sublime, every now and then, to be caught in the rain? When she was ten years-old, my daughter Kelsey and I took a trip to Washington, D.C. Without checking the weather forecast one morning – this being that long-ago, misty era before GPS-enabled smartphone news alerts – we walked down the Mall to the Lincoln Memorial. Once inside, as we read the marble-chiseled words of the Gettysburg Address in the great man’s shadow, the heavens split open and, boy, did it ever rain. We stood with four score or so people on the lip of the monument, looking with Lincoln at the water bounding off the surface of the Reflecting Pool. How long will it last? asked Kelsey, and Old Abe, grimacing in his chair, made no reply. After about 15 minutes, the thunderstorm eased into a light drizzle. I think it’s passing, I said. Let’s make a run for it. So before anyone else dared budge we galloped down the steps and we hadn’t gone a hundred yards before the rain came down like gangbusters again; the clouds rumbled, lightening flashed! Man, cold rain! The ground erupted into spongy mud and we held hands, dad and daughter, and Kelsey giggled and splashed as we waded through a puddle up to her knees. By the time we’d finished our merry run across the Mall to Union Station, we were soaked to the very marrow of our bones. The colors on her t-shirt had run down Kelsey’s belly, to her delight, and we feasted on hot cocoa and steaming baked potatoes with butter in the train station food court. Then we rushed to our hotel and took scalding showers. All the while we laughed and recounted the great adventure, our foolish folly, and to this day Kelsey’s face brightens like a beacon when telling the tale of getting caught in the rain at the Lincoln Memorial on the best trip we ever took together.*

*On the other hand, if by umbrella you mean taking steps to sustain a livable planet, protect human rights and secure a decent chance at prosperity and happiness for future generations, then let’s pack an umbrella and to heck with spontaneity.

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(page 15) She started her new life as I drove away, and I started mine.*

*It was an emotional time for both of us, a stepping into separate voids, separate futures. To my surprise, that ripping-away emotion remained strong when I brought her and her growing, cord-tangled load of stuff to college for her sophomore and then junior years. Kelsey, though, had no such issues. College had become another home for her, a bastion of friendships and circumscribed challenges, and I’m glad of that. By the end of August, she’s primed to get back to school. But the moment we lug the final stash of coats and blankets and sheets (were these washed?) up the echoing stairwell and into her dorm room, must she really give the old man the bum’s rush? Sigh, she must.*

*My daughter is now 26 and lives in a city 600 miles away. We see each other two or three times a year and speak on the phone every weekend. She won’t friend me on Facebook. This is normal, I’m told. But I wonder, as I take care of my elderly mother in a nearby nursing home, if Kelsey will be around for me – in person, physically, -- when I’m old and infirm and repeating stories about that time we got caught in the Abe Lincoln rain. Will the cord between father and daughter, now frayed, come undone?

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(page 19) The fuzziest one, knitted and blue, came down from my sister Suzanne. She wore it when she was an only child (like Kelsey) in the 1950s, before a torrent of siblings smothered her teenage years.*

*Suzanne says she was “intrigued by the idea of a large family” – until it actually occurred and then the reality wasn’t so hot. Her fascination was sparked by Margaret Sydney’s Five Little Peppers books; the first in the series, The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, appeared in 1881. The Peppers lived in “a little brown house,” and led surprisingly fun and action-packed lives for the staid Victorian era. I got my picture of fake family life from reading The Happy Hollisters, who stumbled over mysterious packages and eccentric cousins at an alarming rate, while Kelsey embraced the homey life of Hobbits in The Lord of Rings trilogy.*

*My sister Suzanne never had kids of her own – is this how families die out, when grown children shy from the “big family” model of their Catholic parents and produce few grandchildren or none at all? My four siblings and I in the LaCroix family have borne six grandchildren, and only one is a boy carrying the Name. A lot of pressure for young Christopher who, egad, time flies at supersonic speeds, isn’t so young anymore and better get cracking or his father, desperate for direct descendants to fill up the many, many bedrooms in his Cape Cod vacation mansion, may have to start cloning.

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(page 28) My god, the things she carried in her dorm room! One person! About now there’s 6.75 billion of us and counting toward seven billion (the big day comes in February, 2012), then eight, then nine, and finally it levels off at 9.2 billion in 2050.*

*UN population projections cite 9.2 billion as the likely middle course. If fertility rates take a dive, however, the number could level off at 8 billion in 2050, and if expected decreases in baby making don’t occur, get ready for a 2050 with 10.5 billion folks. I’m personally responsible (with her mother) for one additional human being, and I’m also the only parent in my extended family to opt for one kid. Why only one? It wasn’t a matter of ideology and we could have afforded it; Kelsey was simply enough; she was so wonderful that having another child seemed redundant, even pointless. Besides, why push your luck? Actually there’s more to it: I didn’t particularly enjoy having brothers and sisters. In fact, I found them a source of pain and anxiety. I don’t blame them – our family was twisted in knots by an abusive, alcoholic father and by the secrecy woven around that – but to this day I wrestle with brother/sister issues. Hence I “deprived” Kelsey of a sibling to spare her the trouble – but of course there’s more to it. My wife at the time was calibrating her next move. Her motivations were a mystery then, but not so much now: she felt that sharing one child, rather than two or more, was a manageable scenario for a possible future without me as her husband.*

*Whoops – UN population projections now cite 9.7 billion as the likely middle course for 2050, and what’s another 500 million hungry souls? India will easily pass China as the most populated country and plucky Nigeria, where birth control appears to be a tall tale, will double its population and jump past the U.S. into third place. Then there will be 400 million Nigerians, give or take. Capital: Lagos. Lots of oil. Muslims mostly, poor. West coast of Africa (I think). Good national soccer team. Sadly, that’s all I know.
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(page 31) In the car* we talked about movies we’d like to see before she started her summer job in her mother’s city.

*I have since traded in my Honda for…nothing. Actually, I donated it to the Kidney Foundation and took to riding the subway and using ZipCar, a car-sharing service run through the Internet. Getting rid of my faithful car wasn’t easy, let me tell you; it was my third car and my favorite, and for years I had driven it back and forth to New Hampshire to pick up my daughter at her mother’s house where she spent most weekends of her childhood. I made the three-hour round trip about 475 times. Maybe it was the winding roads, the engine’s thrum, or the enforced proximity, but we had the best Sunday afternoon conversations in that car, long chats about her teachers and Star Trek and books and cartoons and clothes and the terrible, awful thing her whiny stepsister said, and I’d tell stories about her grandmother and uncles and aunts, about my childhood. We always played Twenty Questions. There were times, too, when she cried so hard about some sadness weighing on her soul that I had to pull the car over and rub her back as the sobs slowly, slowly subsided. Once the muffler just about fell off in a snowstorm and I used a coat hanger in the trunk to tie it back up. I slid under the car to do the job and Kelsey held tightly onto my ankle. These Sundays were our mutual flip-turns as we went back to our lives as father and daughter against the world. So you can see why it was hard letting that good car go and equally strange to become an American who does not own a car, who doesn’t possess a massive slab of steel and plastic rolling on rubber, who has extricated himself from the system of perpetual vehicle ownership that is good enough for everyone else in the country except for bums, hippies, and liberal eccentrics. The tow truck arrived around 10 a.m.; I heard it growling in the driveway while I pulled on pants and sneakers. As the driver winched my Honda’s worn tires into the air and ran those mysterious chains around the axles, I asked him what would happen next. Would my car be sold for scrap? Probably not, he said. But it failed inspection, I explained, its gaskets are torn, its manifold cracked. “Doesn’t matter,” he replied, “someone will fix it.” “Where will it go?” “Anywhere.” “You mean out of the country?” “Sure, Haiti, South America, anywhere in the world.” “Africa?” “Why not?” Then I told him: “I drove her 15 years.” A patient fellow, he smiled and slapped his palm on the dented, rusty hood. “Someone might drive her another fifteen.” I touched the hood, too, but gently, and there I was a minute later standing in the middle of the road waving goodbye to my car. I mouthed “thank you” and felt like I was gonna cry if I didn’t run inside.*

*Wouldn’t you know, just last week I donated another car to the Kidney Foundation, this one the 1993 Toyota Corolla that we acquired when Elahna’s mother, Hadassah, stopped driving. She’s since died, just checked out suddenly, dare I say a bit rudely as her brisk departure gave us no time to say goodbye while she was conscious. What she heard or misheard in the Intensive Care Unit will remain a mystery for the foreseeable future. Did she even feel our hands holding hers? So, anyway, I had grown to like her old car but the high cost of repairs was getting ridiculous. So we disposed of it – you know, when an elderly person dies it’s as if you keep burying her for months and months: estate and probate issues, packing and unpacking of possessions, surreal hospital and ambulance bills, picking out the gravestone with just the right Hebrew saying. And so on. And what to do on Passover without her? On her birthday? And how to divert the prodigious flood of shoe, coat, gardening and archeological tour catalogs that our mailman with the enormous calves hauls up our walk? We’ve since replaced her Toyota with an all-electric BMW i3, built in a green factory and powered by the solar panels on our roof. Hadassah, who grew up in Jerusalem during Israel’s War of Independence, would never have bought a German car, but I’m glad we did. Sooner or later, you have to forgive.

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(page 36) Ninety countries earned the free ranking from Freedom House, ten more countries than were found to be democratic by the Economist’s reckoning. Sixty countries were judged as partly free and 43 as not free. A merging of the two indices reveals that about half the world’s population is denied human rights.*

*It’s hard to look at an individual human being and understand why that person should be denied freedom. One day last summer, Kelsey and I were sitting on the back porch and I looked up at her and marveled. She was reading a novel, unaware of my scrutiny, her head slightly cocked, her blonde hair spilling toward the pages, and the expression on her face was relaxed but absorbed; she glowed in the late afternoon sunshine. For that moment she seemed absolutely comfortable in her skin and it was as if my daughter’s potential as a human being had quietly surfaced, as if I had seen through a window into her best possible future. As if I had heard an echo of good things to come. Portrait of Kelsey on Porch – it’s the image of her I carry in my head. (Often, though, I still think of her as a skipping, crying little girl. She kept tra-la-la skipping long after her classmates stopped; she cried prodigiously, in great gulping gasps.) In the Prado museum in Madrid, there’s a self portrait by the artist Durer, painted in 1498. I looked at him long and hard one day, as Spanish and English words floated around me, and he stared back haughty and unwavering, proclaiming I Am, I Will Be across 512 years, across the Age of Enlightenment and all the wars and revolutions and near apocalypses that followed. Like I said, it’s hard to look at an individual human being and understand why that person should be denied freedom.*

*In its 2016 report, Freedom House notes another bad year for global freedom, which has been on the decline for ten years. Seventy-two countries declined in freedom last year; 43 showed improvement. This has occurred simultaneously with the rise of the Internet and its emphasis on individual expression through social media. Do we have a paradox here? As for my daughter, I remain ever hopeful that her best possible future will come to pass despite the travails and challenges of life in this fractious century.

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(page 54) W. Warren Wagar, the preeminent scholar on H.G. Wells, received a jolt of publicity in 1983 from an Associated Press article about his History of World War III course. The story focused on the professor’s worries about nuclear war,* but also included his belief that any of four developments could avert catastrophe: disarmament, world government, an international order led by multinational corporations, and the rise of a “technological community” that takes over the key functions of government.

*Wagar was no doomsday peddler, nor were his Reagan-era students. In a survey he gave his classes in 1983, only 10 percent felt that the world would destroy itself, a marked change from the 30 percent who felt we were gonzo during the frugal reign of Jimmy Carter, just one year before. Besides, doomsday isn’t always that bad in the end. Wager’s book Terminal Visions: The Literature of Last Things notes that more than 80 percent of the 350 end-time stories he researched ushered in an era of transformation and renewal. (It’s the getting there that hurts, all those trials and tribulations.) If Wagar waxed pessimistic in 1983, we might recall that the Cold War hit a hysterical peak in that year. January: millions march, including yours truly during a semester abroad in London, in opposition to President Reagan’s plan to deploy more nuclear missiles in Western Europe. March: Reagan labels the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” and accelerates research on a space-based “Star Wars” defense shield against a nuclear first strike. April: eleven year-old Samantha Smith of Houlton, Maine, writes Soviet leader Yuri Andropov and asks him, “Are you going to vote to have a war or not?” June: Andropov, who as KGB chief savagely repressed the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and the Prague Spring of 1968, writes cloying letter to Samantha comparing her to Becky Thatcher in Tom Sawyer. July: Samantha visits Soviet Union and tells world that Soviet citizens are “just like us,” but her meeting with Andropov is canceled. September: Soviet jets shoot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, killing 269 people including a U.S. congressman. October: tens of millions read, including yours truly at his mother’s kitchen table, article in Parade magazine by Carl Sagan describing horrors of globe-enshrouding “nuclear winter” that could result from a nuclear “exchange.” November: 100 million plus Americans grow communally terrified, once more including yours truly, as they watch The Day After, a TV movie depicting nuclear Armageddon in excruciating detail. It was a freaky year. Andropov is dead by February 1984 and, sadly, the remarkable Samantha Smith, who had written a book on her adventures and starred in a TV series as the precocious daughter of an international sophisticate, was killed in a plane crash the following August. Emotional messages were sent to her funeral by President Reagan and Soviet leader Michael Gorbachev, whose partnership would engineer a peaceful end to the Cold War, and who’s to say the world wouldn’t have turned out differently but for little Samantha Smith, a butterfly whose wings beat strongly, and who can’t forgive William Wagar for despairing of man’s fate, now and then, with all that crazy stuff going on in 1983?*

*It only occurred to me yesterday – ever late my brain blooms – that my fascination with the year 1983 bumps up against my love of George Orwell’s novel 1984. In that crazy year of schoolgirl peaceniks and looming Armageddon, did some people believe that we were headed into some kind of Orwellian dead zone – as soon as the next year?

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(page 66) Don’t look for a politician to lead the cause, Paul Raskin insists, but someone along the lines of Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi. Hmmm, sounds like a tall order.*

* The closest thing now to a Global Citizens Movement is something called the World Social Forum, which held its 2009 summit in Belem, Brazil. Over 100,000 activists attended and I’m sure that most of them are idealistic, kind, and striving to help the downtrodden, right wrongs, and keep the world from spiraling into the Barbarization    era. But it’s disturbing to read that Venezuelan petro-dictator Hugo Chavez got a rousing welcome there, and it’s very disturbing to see the inclusion of anarchist and extremist groups, many of whom blame Jews for the excesses of capitalism and reflexively malign Israel. If this “diverse” gang is the Global Citizens Movement that will someday rescue the planet and bring about a fab future for mankind, count me out. I’d rather charge up the down escalator with the Policy Reform fools. Call me stubborn. (Kelsey tells me to relax; her generation is way too materialistic and hooked into pop culture to demand big changes; maybe the next generation, she says. Maybe I caught her on a bad day.)*

*Well, now in 2016 we also have the global youth brigade of 350.org battling climate change and the fervent young folks championing Bernie Sanders’ political revolution that came up short against policy-reformer Hilary Clinton. Maybe the whole rotten apple cart will finally be toppled, burned…and here comes a raging, worldwide fever for a smartphone video game called Pokémon Go and what’s that you were saying?

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(page 69) In 2030, tiny Belize will be inundated with millions of refugees.*

*Until that crisis, Belize had managed to remain one of the most delightful and remote countries in the world. As Aldous Huxley said when he visited in 1934, Belize is “not on the way to anywhere from anywhere else.” He said that in a snotty way, alas, wondering why the British Empire bothered with keeping it, especially since the chief Belizean export, mahogany, was no longer the preferred wood for an English dining table. When I visited there in 2010, Belize had a population density of 36 people per square mile; compare that to 83 per square mile in the U.S. (including Alaska!), 334 per square mile in Guatemala, and 877 per in Israel. It was a young country then with half the population under the age of 20 and I often think of a little Belizean girl in a pink, frilly dress we spied as we bumped along the rutted, red-clay road leading to the Five Sisters Lodge in the rainforest. It was a cinematic image, something out of an old Western: our van turned the corner and there she was, the little girl, maybe seven years old and running in bare feet from the door of her small house roofed in tin and thatch to the fence at the edge of the road, waving happily, waving at us, the eco-tourists from Los Estados Unidos. Elahna waved back. The girl’s frilly dress was the pinkest thing I’ve ever seen, pink beyond imagining against her black skin, and I think I saw chickens in her wake and a little brother – though my mind could have supplied those details. We passed one car during our hour’s drive on that road and I wonder how many times a day the girl in pink ran like crazy from her stoop to wave at a passing vehicle. Was she just fooling around, bored? Or was it the highlight of her day – to see the people from far away go by, to show off her beautiful dress – and I wonder, too, what happened to the grown woman who was once that little girl. Is she alive? Does she still wear pink?*

*Okay, enough with the 2030 look back. In real time, that little girl is now thirteen or fourteen, and it’s not easy being an adolescent anywhere in the world. Let’s hope she’s getting a good education. She’s gonna need it as I read that average no longer cuts it in this ultracompetitive, globalized economy, and btw, mahogany remains out of fashion as furniture. Confirmation: unfashionable me owns several sturdy pieces.

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(page 72) If nothing else I’ve built into my system the sustaining belief that my next job/ destination/adventure will be fantastic or at least worth the effort. I’ve learned to recover from failure and make myself anew.*

* Several times my sister Suzanne has told me the story of the enormous, abandoned aloe plant – and let me state first that I believe people repeat stories, even stray ones about aloe plants, because they have profound meaning in their lives. In one version of the aloe tale, it’s discovered in a pile of dirt by the side of the road; in another, Suzanne finds it dumped in the back of her brother-in-law’s pickup truck, root ball and all. At any rate, she takes the hulking aloe home and plants it in the fertile soil of her garden, giving it extra doses of nitrogen, water, and love. But the darn thing goes limp and fades, its bright green spears turning dark in the Florida sun. Despite her kind ministrations, the aloe is dying. Brown juice oozes like pus from erupting seams in the plant’s skin. All right, says Suzanne, no more Ms. Nice Gal! She marches to a nearby construction site, scoops up a load of the worst, sandiest soil on Earth plentifully poisoned with toxic debris, and returns to her yard. She yanks up the orphan aloe, mixes the garbage soil into the ground, and shoves the plant right in there: eat that, buster! And drink rainwater, no more special concoction for you! Well, wouldn’t you know it, the aloe soon it regains its green glow, metastasizing a tangle of new, mutant branches. In adversity, life blooms.*

*Yes, I agree, but let’s not make a cult of this observation Some plants and people and places and traditions infused with wisdom and passed down from generation to generation require nurturing, need a good bit of clucking over. Another thing I have come to know: as you age, it gets much harder to make one’s self anew. So it’s best not to chance the transition too many times before time and odds catch up with you.

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(page 83) Contrary to the propaganda of the Goodyear Corporation, the Olmec people of Mesoamerica invented vulcanized rubber over a thousand years ago using the juice of the morning glory as a catalytic agent.*

*I grow a pot of morning glories on my back porch. Slowly, surely they entangle and ascend a huge trellis screwed to the house, putting out one or two blue blooms per night in early summer and then accelerating the output until 20-25 blooms of blue and purple and white, and blue streaked with veins of purple, explode nightly in September and early October. Is this a homegrown metaphor, acceleration of change photosynthesized, and if so are we approaching the autumn of our days? Has Mankind stumbled into mid-life, with its high productivity and creeping anxieties, its blooming crises? Soon, of course, the morning glory blooms of October flag and come less profusely, then not at all, and the leaves hang limp and brown. And so I collect hard, black seeds from its pods for the spring crop and harvest the plant’s limbic juice for making a rubber ball to throw against a wall, ba-doom, ba-doom, all winter long.*

*I’ve continued to harvest morning glory seeds every fall and replant them in the spring, producing blooms with direct ancestors going back ten years now. Over time, though, the color diversity of blooms has narrowed for complicated genetic reasons, and I have the impression that the plants don’t climb up trellises as aggressively, but that may be due to the partial shadiness of the backyard at our new house. Nonetheless, perhaps next year I’ll introduce some immigrant, even refugee seeds into the mix…

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(page 85) It can be argued, she says, that we’ve entered a near-plateau of technological stasis after the seminal discoveries of oil (1858), internal combustion (1860), electric light bulb (1879), radio (1893), antibiotics (1909), television (1927), electron microscope (1931), controlled nuclear fission (1945), rocketry for space travel and satellite seeding (1949), the computer chip (1953), and finally the polio vaccine (1955) and laser (1960). Those were the low-hanging fruit, easy picking. Since those breakthroughs, it’s been mostly gadgets and gizmos adept at measurement, miniaturization, and magnification*, at reshaping, reworking, and cleverly combining, at distributing far, deep, and wide.

*Oh, how our modern eyes do roam – into the switchback structures of proteins that comprise our genes, through the galactic mist to Earth-like planets around distant stars. It’s gee-whiz-bang to the nth degree, intellectually fascinating, yet such far seeing isn’t likely to change our lives for a long time. Everything’s got to have a catch, no? For instance, scientists have developed a powerful new CT scanner that detects until-now-undetectable soft plaque in arteries – a marker of “silent heart disease” which afflicts apparently healthy individuals. Problem is, this magnificent magnification, this feat of coronary sleuthing, happens to be outrageously expensive and therefore cannot be employed to screen its intended audience – healthy, middle-aged folk like me – unless its price drops one-hundred fold. Of course, rich people can always pay out of pocket.*

*Be careful what you write about. A problem heart is just a short breath, a skipped beat away, and there I was last month in Mass General Hospital’s catheterization lab, twice, getting my atria examined by amazing gizmos at the tips of catheters inserted into veins in my arm and neck. Good news: no coronary heart disease or pulmonary hypertension. Not good: dilated right ventricle and pulmonary artery caused by a congenital abnormality called an atrial septal defect (ASD). A shunt, the doctors say. Translation: there’s a hole in my heart the size of a quarter, causing trouble over time. (Toss in anomalous pulmonary veins to further complicate matters.) Surgical consult pending. An ASD is a random glitch in the body’s system, over decades sabotaging the cathedral of the heart like a patient, artisan-vandal, and it’s not an inherited defect. So I can’t really blame my parents, and there’s no evidence that the anti-miscarriage drugs my mother took had a role, despite Internet med-gossip. Why, btw, did she go to such lengths to have a fifth, anomalous child? Why risk another miscarriage? Did my mom exercise control over her future, and by extension mine, or was it dictated by her husband, the censorious church or some primal urge beyond reckoning? I guess Leonard Cohen sang it best: “There is a crack, a crack in everything/that’s how the light gets in.”

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(page 93) The poet Samuel Coleridge got it right: “The light that experience gives us is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us.” Or to quote the main character in Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel, Looking Backward, written in 1887 and set in a futuristic Boston of the year 2000: “One can look back a thousand years easier than forward fifty.”*

*Nonetheless, it’s hard not to try. I’m a big fan of Peter Turchin’s War and Peace and War, with its impassioned riffs on the life cycles of imperial nations, the meta-ethnic frontiers where empires arise, and the singular quality of asabiya – “the capacity of a social group for concerted, collective action,” – without which a country cannot survive. Uh oh – that’s us. I also admire Robert Jay Lofton’s book on the Aum Shinrikyo cult responsible for the 1995 sarin gas attacks in the Tokyo subway system. Lofton believes that Japan suffers from “psychohistorical dislocation – a breakdown of the social and institutional arrangements that ordinarily anchor human lives” a syndrome in which “people experience a profound gap between what they feel themselves to be and what a society or culture expects them to be.” Analysis not restricted to Japan – uh oh, again.*

*Indeed, looking ahead is almost impossible. Ray Bradbury, among the most esteemed sci-fi writers of the 20th century, had a talent for envisioning future scenarios replete with time travel, telepathy and advanced technologies, but he could not for the life of him envision a future in which women were not primarily housewives and a bit hysterical to boot. Female presidents, CEOs, doctors, lawyers, crime lords, TV anchors, geologists – unimaginable! And so his aproned honeys bake peach crumble on Mars while the men go out to laser-vaporize floating, blue indigenous life forms. Same as it always was.

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(page 101) The clerk at Petsi Pies, who has that shaggy, perpetual grad student aura, notices the paperback in my pocket – The Elephant Vanishes, by Haruki Murakami – and we exchange enthusiasm for his work. I remark on a story in the book about a man who burns down old barns as a hobby and the grad student shakes his head, yes, yes, he knows it, but then the door chimes and a customer approaches the bakery case, pointing at a pie. The clerk and I nod at each other, co-conspirators in the vast Murakami cult.*

*Murakami’s books have sold tens of millions of copies and are translated into more than 40 languages. There is little exotic or Japanese about them, and with a few name and detail changes his stories could take place in almost any country in the world. He is a World Author writing World Literature. Kim Choon Me, professor at Korean University, says young people in South Korea “have found in Murakami a cultural code in which they can share their own conflicts and woes, a code that perfectly speaks to them.” She continues: “The more the world grows into a late capitalist society, his novels can be expected to spread with increasing force as transnational cultural commodities.” Not hard commodities, though, like Nike sneakers or McDonald’s hamburgers or Disney plastic action figures. Murakami provides commodities of dreams, elusive and beguiling dreams shared over bakery counters and across cities and oceans and barbed-wire borders. According to Roland Kelts, author of Japanamerica, readers see in Murakami’s narratives “the tones and colors of their own dreams…something they know and feel, but maybe cannot explain.” *

*Murakami-mania has only increased with record-breaking sales of his recent novels 1Q84 and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage. The obvious terminus of this trend, if Murakami can live and write long enough, is that every reader on the planet will one day buy a copy of his latest book, making him richer than Oprah. Murakami likens writing to eating fried oysters alone and lists Raymond Chandler and Kurt Vonnegut as key influences. Speaking of Vonnegut, I once heard him on the Imus in the Morning radio show say that Hitler should be sentenced in Hell to a never-ending orgasm, and that kind of lost me and Imus, too. Also, I must admire that phrase I coined in the footnote above, “commodities of dreams.” In the great commodities market for dreams, somewhere I think in Nebraska, would you be buying or selling?

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(page 104) Over here, Draper Labs, the Whitehead Institute, Novartis. Over there, the Broad Institute, Genzyme, the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research rising from a fenced-off square of ground. The place is booming; it’s a little China, Dubai, Singapore, Bangalore. Here, in our backyard! Oh, what elixirs for longer and better life brew about me! What potions of hope immemorial! It cheers me that Elahna, a biomedical researcher as well as a pediatrician, is part of this grand effort.*

*She called during an earlier segment of this ramble and griped about the paperwork for flying eight genetically modified mice in from London. In New York they would undergo artificial insemination and then be mailed to her lab in Boston. You know, typical female yakkity-yak. The trials and tribulations of these mutant mice were funded with a tiny, tiny portion of President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package intended to juice the U.S. economy. It’s all part of Elahna’s quixotic quest to locate the genes that cause kidney disease – kidney disease in mice, she will add in deprecation. One day she expressed discomfort for “wasting” taxpayers’ money on a project with low odds of success and I, the ever-helpful partner, reminded her that “negative results” (failures) can inform future researchers of which dead ends to avoid. So ship those mice already!*

* Alas, Elahna never published her negative results and soon left the basic research world to focus on clinical work, so some schmuck valedictorian genius may someday go down the same research rabbit holes. We keep repeating our mistakes, individually and as a species, although the saviors of big data, artificial intelligence, augmented reality and cross-departmental mindfulness promise to sort out the great garbage mound of information, both stupid and smart. Or things might just get mucked up worse, which might not be all bad. Perhaps my wife’s experiments bore ambiguous results (flopped) because her technician forgot to stir something clockwise rather than counter-clockwise and, therefore, with proper technique and the right glint of light through the 13th floor skylight, it’ll be Eureka! Eureka! the next time around.

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(page 111) Tenants listed include Boston Paintball, an asset recovery firm, and a substance abuse counseling center. Are paintballers in there now, warless warriors ranging across a post-industrial landscape, pattered with red, blue, green, DayGlo orange, and security-stone pink?*

*Color, is that it? Is that what makes the world of today seem so different, so achingly modern, than the world of 50-75 years ago? The bright neon colors, the endless variations of shades, some of which do not under any circumstances appear in nature. A cavalcade of colors on hats, shoes, t-shirts, cars, city buses, and airplanes, crazy Calypso colors swirling on movie, PC, and cell phone screens, power colors streaking the donated clothes of the poorest slum kids. The past was so drab, the colors muted, isn’t that the idea? No cobalt blue on Cary Grant, no avocado green on Kate Hepburn.*

*Now I can add to that list the multicolored orange and lime-green sneakers everyone’s wearing. A variation on the modern-by-color effect, as described above, occurs in contemporary historical movies. For instance, I’d seen Jesse Owen’s feats at the 1936 Berlin Olympics only in black-and-white documentary form, but the recent film Race depicts his life and track-and-field victories in vibrant color. Who knew that U.S. athletes were issued blue boutonnieres upon arrival in Nazi Germany? The red of the swastika flags, like blood. In color, it seems as if it all happened yesterday. Semi-brilliant idea: add modern conveniences to films set in the past – swap guns for swords, iPhones for black rotary jobs, luminescent yellow Nikes for Jessie’s handmade Adi Dassler spikes – and time itself will be obliterated. Everything and everywhen will be now.

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(page 121) So here’s the deal. Between early 2002, as the U.S. routed the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks, and late 2008, as voters chose a “Yes, We Can” president to deliver us from decline (ruined 401Ks, rusted bridges, eroded reputation, setbacks in Afghanistan, etc), over half of Americans changed their minds about the country’s prospects. Flip-flop: right to wrong. Silly me, for I had assumed that like the speed and heading of an ocean liner, the nation’s direction could not be so easily altered.*

*The inauguration of a new president buoyed the nation’s spirits, causing the wrong-track score to scud down to 48% by the spring of 2009, according to the NYT/CBS News poll. When the perceived bloom came off the Obama rose, the sense of national wrong-trackedness rose to 62% by the winter of 2010. Of course, these polls measure the pulse of Americans who can get to the phone before it stops ringing or whose hands can operate a cell phone without nuking the call. I mention this in deference to my aged, arthritic mother who complains, “I’ve never been polled!” She is personally affronted, suspicious of the entire enterprise. So I polled her myself: Mims, is the country on the right track? Of course not, she replied.*

*Since 2009, wrong-track ratings have fluctuated but never dipped below 50%; currently, in July of 2016, we sit at a disgruntled 76%. Right track: 18%. How, oh how, shall we reroute our national train? Resurrecting the 1950s, an era in which our over-rated prosperity depended on the misery of most everyone else on the planet, isn’t really an option. I say, stop consuming news about politics and crime and soon you’ll acquire a much sunnier outlook. Imbibing an all-day stream of negative imagery and confrontational rhetoric, not to mention ads for products you don’t really want or need and can’t afford besides, is not only injurious to self but not even representative of world trends. Of course someone is being killed, raped, mugged and discriminated against somewhere every second – we have 7.4 billion people out there and everyone’s taping everything! Of course politicians are corrupt and taffy-pull the truth – they’re politicians, for the sake of Richard M. Nixon! Enough! Remember the counterculture slogan “Turn on, tune in, drop out” from the 1960s? In 2016 it may be time for “turn off, tune out, drop in.” Turn off the pipeline of junk thought and hate that breeds dissatisfaction. Tune out the people transfixed by said circuses. And drop in to the world of neighbors, gardens and forest trails, of art and books, of homemade meals and conversations stuffed with stories, of backyard badminton tournaments, of tangible life. Btw, I haven’t succeed in doing these things, not far enough anyway, not yet.

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(page 124) Since its debut, the Doomsday Clock has fluctuated between two minutes to midnight in 1953 to a comfortable 17 minutes at the end of the Cold War, in 1991. Alas, we slipped back to five minutes before the deadly stroke in 2007, but there are so many other alarming global developments that it’s hard to get worried or even notice anymore*

*It’s amazing, really, a goddamn miracle, that we survived the Cold War. Go to the Titan Missile Museum in Arizona and tour the nuclear missile silo there which nearly blew up once when a worker dropped a wrench down the main shaft. Smoking was allowed in areas near the central control room – a monument of 1950s solid-state technology, much like the 8-track stereo system – and precautions against catastrophe were laughable. For instance, to affect a launch two keys had to be turned simultaneously. The keyholes were located about two feet farther apart than a large man’s wingspan in order to prevent a rouge missileer from doing the job alone. Perhaps, in that misty era, they had not yet invented the GrabberReacher which my mother uses to snare things from shelves and under chairs. With one of those babies in each hand, she could have nuked us all.*

*In 2016 the Doomsday Clock, which actually hangs on a wall at the University of Chicago, has slipped back to three minutes to midnight. The last time matters were so dicey was 1984, before Reagan and Gorbachev began meeting. In 1953 the Clock reached two minutes to midnight, primarily because the U.S. and Soviet Union had just conducted the first air-tests of thermonuclear weapons. The 2016 report includes in its assessment the threat of global warming, as well as the “potentially catastrophic misuses of new technologies.” Such as Pokémon Go. I joke, I think.

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(page 132) The essay rails against the human desire to find ever new ways, benign or not, to exploit nature. And soon, Thoreau seethes, “We will wash water, and warm fire, and cool ice, and under-prop the earth. We will teach birds to fly, and fishes to swim, and ruminants to chew the cud.” *

*Twenty-first century examples of these perversions abound. Who, after all, would drink unwashed water? Many engineers want to fight global warming by seeding the atmosphere with billions of tons of sulfates, or by floating armadas of sun-reflecting mirrors on the oceans and across the heavens – do they not seek to “underprop the earth”? Thoreau’s head would have exploded contemplating the Apps in our iPods and iPads. According to David Chalmers of the Australian National University, the App craze has allowed “cognition to creep beyond our skulls.” Who needs a brain when we can carry one around in our hand? It’s a question I should have asked this moron at Walden Pond talking on his iPhone just yards from the spot where Thoreau built his cabin.*

*I can’t help but think of that Delacroix painting of Hamlet in the graveyard holding aloft his friend’s skull and lamenting with bitter grief, “Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him, Horatio” but in this updated version broody Hamlet grips Yorick’s yucky, pulsating brain and asks, “Yorick, fellow of infinite jest and excellent fancy who hath borne me on his back a thousand times, what time does the Trader Joe’s at Fresh Pond open on Sunday?” Hamlet has a lengthy to-do list. There’s more to life than angst and lamentation. Horatio, standing two feet away, has zoned out playing Angry Birds on his Android.

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(page 136) Klutzy, crappy sadists, black at heart and in behavior, that’s your white swan. Let’s not idealize him.*

*Footnote reserved for English majors and poetry geeks: I also blame William Butler Yeats’ The Wild Swans at Coole for gilding the swan lily. “Brilliant creatures,” he calls them in the much-anthologized poem, drifting “on the still water/Mysterious, beautiful.”   It wasn’t so much swans he saw, of course, but his precious youth flying away: “All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight/The first time on this shore/The bell-beat of their wings above my head.” The lesson here is to doubt the observational accuracy of moony, middle-aged men wondering whatever happened to the good old days.*

*Above sentence and footnote have to do with a book, The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It’s sort of intriguing, the idea that rare, unexpected events (black swans) change the course of history, and that people in retrospect will deny the phenomenon. They want to preserve the illusion of steady, controllable progress. Taleb’s a bit of a blatherskite, but you kind of have to be to pull off a book that can be condensed to a few sentences. Anyway, a few days before Hadassah died, I got a call that she’d been sent to the ER at Mass General. I met her there and the first thing she did was hold up a library copy of The Black Swan and ask if I’d read it. Yes, I stammered, but what about you, what’s wrong, how are you feeling? Oh, not so good, she said, and then she returned to commenting on the book while stretched flat on a gurney in a bright, fluorescent hallway. It’s intriguing, she said. I’m about halfway done. Book-crazy Hadassah, I thought. Trying anything to preserve the illusion of control, as we all do. But I should have realized that she was announcing: I’m going to die. This, right now, this is my black swan.

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(page 139) A few years ago I published a book about American soldiers in Nazi POW camps called Journey out of Darkness, and one of the details that stuck with me concerns a bird. A former POW remembers watching a bird fly beyond the camp’s barbed wire fence and wanting, so very badly, to reach out and eat it. At the time, he had lost more than 40 pounds and was starving. He didn’t want to fly away like the bird; he wanted to grab the fantastic creature and eat it alive. He was stuck in the needs of the present; that the bird could travel with astounding ease past the prison and over the woods and out of the godforsaken country meant nothing to the hungry man.*

*Rachel von Amerongen-Frankforder, a Holocaust survivor, remembers birds as a “leitmotiv in all the camps.” Unlike my POW, for her the sustenance of birds was the freedom, the pure freedom they displayed. “It seemed so fantastic to me to be able to fly, to wherever you wanted to,” she recalls. “Everywhere there were birds, even in Auschwitz, even in Birkenau, and certainly in Bergen-Belsen, where it was so beautifully green and, at the same time, so gruesomely gray.” For myself, in my safe world, I seek patterns in birds. Long hours of watching the chaotic assault of sparrows on my porch birdfeeder have revealed surprising patterns of approach and retreat within the free-for-all that is feeding time. A loose governance seems at play, a cloud of bird commandments for waiting your turn and turning your wait into breakfast.*

*And yet, when a squirrel all hell-bent or grackle black as velvet intrudes on the feeder, the sparrows and odd chickadees retreat en masse to branch or fence picket. Then they spy for openings to sneak in, grab a snack, retreat. But why can’t these little birds work together to foil the feeder bully? A cloud of ten sparrows, attacking simultaneously, could easily spook a squirrel, send the grackle sputtering. Strength of numbers would prevail – but such strategy takes mutual trust, coordination and occasional sacrifice. The sparrows take a pass instead. And we ask: how often do weak humans combine to overwhelm the swaggering powerful in order to fight for bread or liberty? Are most of us so much better than the sparrows, who, at least, have the consolation of flight?

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(page 145) So, given its flexible and evolving nature, it may be within our power to cook up a delicious future stew by constantly monitoring the taste and feel and look of ingredients in the present, as we go. Through good old fuss and bother, we can get the eventual outcome just right.*

*A stewed future defies the Butterfly Effect. You know, in which the flap of a monarch’s wing in Bolivia causes the death of your Uncle Elvin, sinks a battleship, brings a mighty empire to its knees, or dooms a species. The Butterfly Effect has spiritual appeal, betokening the fragility of all things, and it’s clever to suppose the battle was lost for want of that horseshoe nail, but that makes us horse tenders feel more important than we really are, and let’s not forget the other 745 poorly shorn horses bucking riders or that falling off your horse is a good thing, sometimes, if it keeps the bullet from your brain.*

*Or is the future a salad? Oatmeal? Maybe a scone with world leaders as the pluckable currents? Perhaps all culinary metaphors for tomorrow should be put away in the pantry, so to speak. Permit me, however, to present the Bulldozer Effect. You see, when you ram and plow and gouge away at something long enough – at the earth’s crust, at privacy rights, at the very meaning of words – it tends to make a difference in the long run.

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(page 186) They [economists] generally agree that a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system would finally put a price (right now it’s pretty much free) on environmental degradation and create incentives for people and corporations to curb CO2 emissions and reduce the deforestation and species slaughter that follow from plowing through the earth’s finite cache of resources.*

*The public won’t accept such large-scale changes: so mutter the hard-headed set, and they make a good point. People who drive, fly, and consume a lot get whacked in the wallet with a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system. Old folks who won’t benefit from reduced income taxes – to compensate for higher energy costs – tough luck. Low-consumption, near-vegetarian city dwellers like me, constitutionally intolerant of air conditioning, riding the subway and actually walking places, make out like pirates.*

*Okay, fine, so give the elderly reductions in Medicare premiums and bigger yearly Social Security increases. Make it a straight-up trade: more money in your pocketbook for a carbon tax. Seniors vote prodigiously and could put a climate change-fighting Congress in power. But will a presidential candidate arise with the actual or metaphoric cajones to make such a hard-headed proposal while polls show that two-thirds of Americans oppose a carbon tax? (Trust, I suspect, is an issue here.) Where is that once-in-a-generation leader when we need him or her? Is the future fresh out?

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(page 187) Maybe dogs can hear it, that tube on a volcano in Hawaii screaming its steel alloy off about rising levels of carbon dioxide. Maybe its sound leaks out and Anxiety Man hears it, vague and needling, on the edge of recognition.*

*Such a sound, of course, would not distinguish itself, but rather join the soft avalanche of ambient noise (traffic, computer fans, leaf blowers, TV, radio, radiators, AC, cell phone chatter, etc, etc) that has banished silence from modern life. If someone traveled to our world from 200 years ago, she might at first double over as if struck, palms clamped to ears, beseeching, Why in God’s name is it so noisy? Turn it off! The last time I experienced silence – real silence, deep and unperturbed, so whole that it becomes a thing onto itself – was 15 years ago in Lake Media National Recreation Area in Utah. Kelsey and I were driving southwest on Rt. 167 to the Hoover Dam when a rear tire went flat. We turned off the car and stepped into the 105 degree heat. There was no traffic, no wind, nothing stirring on the black-topped road or the red-rocked desert on both sides. It was amazing. We stood there, our ears straining by habit, and nothing came back. In time, though, I heard my own breathing and, I think, the rolling of blood through my veins, the sliding of sweat on my forehead, and the growth of the fruit on the roadside cactus. “Dad, it’s hot,” said Kelsey, so I set to changing the tire, pausing now and then to hear more nothing, and then we made our way to the humming, thrashing dam.*

* Most Americans only experience silence in our high-decibel era with the aid of noise-canceling earphones. (Even deep and alone in my New England woods: the shush of wind past branches, chipmunks disturbing crisp leaves, birds twittering, bug chorus humming, pine nettles and acorns diving from the canopy, worms worming...) Outfitted like sensitive children at sporting events, the effect of noise-canceling earphones is the negation, not absence, of sound. It’s not the same thing; I repeat, it’s not the same. It’s not even silence, really – more like the strangulation of noise. You really have to go to great lengths to find true silence these days. Hiding in a closet won’t do it (the house creaks, whirs, drips) and even cemeteries hum with composting memory.

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(page 194) We’re in these guys’ plump hands. Oh, and don’t forget this: 15 of the 19 hijackers who attacked America on 9/11 were Saudi Arabians. Feeling anxious yet?*

*As you may have noted, the Saudi rulers burn my butt. They are insufferable – their platitudinous promises, their meek demeanor cloaking iron fists. The way they accepted a chaste kiss and hand-in-hand walk in the ranch grass with former President Bush, as he begged them for more oil. The way His Oiliness King Abdullah smiled so mildly when President Obama made a quarter-bow as they shook hands. Hey, U.S. presidents – have some pride! It’s not just the Saudis, I have to admit. I keep a collection of things that drive me nuts, like some people collect Hummels or leather-bound volumes of Thackeray: the Saudis, super-sized anything, the screeching sound of coffee grinders at Starbucks, selfish senior citizens – and that’s just s. My Saudi problem reached Peak Ire, I think, when I watched Lesley Stahl interview the Saudi Arabian oil minister, Ali Al-Naimi, on 60 Minutes – the venerable TV news magazine still pulling 12 million viewers, most of them wearing bifocals. Al-Naimi, Stahl informed us, suffers from vertigo and heartburn when oil prices fluctuate wildly. The poor billionaire managed not to topple from his chair, though, wearing an Arctic white robe with a black headband and frameless glasses. His mustache was a peppery white thing, almost floppy, and he spoke in a relaxed manner, assertive but humble, lying but not obvious about it. Stahl seemed charmed by the oil minister, even as she tried to drill through the bedrock of his rehearsed commentary. Her questions were occasionally sharp, but she rarely challenged his answers. (Perhaps she was skittish after French President Sarkozy walked out of an interview with her earlier in the year.) When Stahl asked Al-Naimi if his country had reached Peak Oil, Al-Naimi responded reassuringly: “The truth is, here is the Kingdom with more than 260 billion barrels and I firmly believe that the potential to add another 200 billion barrels of oil are there to be found.” Rehearsed, wiggle words – “potential to add,” “there to be found.” Words tend to betray the speaker, I believe, squirming away from bald deception as if they have honest characters of their own. Al-Naimi looked down as he spoke, blinking rapidly, his left hand rising and falling in spasms. Or was that the heartburn and vertigo? Recall, too, how he started his oceans-of-oil declaration: “The truth is...” I don’t know about you, but that opening always puts me on high-lie alert. It’s like someone justifying their bad behavior or ignorance by stating, “All I know is…” Okay, fine, I’m parsing words and analyzing physical tics (look for yourself – the interview is on You Tube). But that’s all there is to go on, ‘cause the Saudis aren’t telling. I should also admit that part of me wants the Saudis to be lying. If there really is all that oil, I’m pretty sure we’ll burn it and then, so to speak, we’re cooked. There were several other disturbing moments in the Al-Naimi interview. Briefly: his arrogant statement that “What is good for the well-being of Saudi Arabia should be good for the well-being of the world, too,” channeling General Motor’s old dictum (and veiled threat) that corporation and nation share the same heartbeat; his dismissal of renewable energy as mere “supplements” for the next 30 years; his remark, regarding OPEC countries that diverge from Saudi-think, that “nothing gets jammed down our throat;” and finally, his benevolent assessment that American ways are “good ways, excellent ways.” Thank you very much for your fucking approval! Stahl also traveled to two impressive mega-projects which she presented as new developments coming on line in 2009, even though they operated at lesser scale years ago. There she gawked and crowed: “Steel as far as the eye can see!” The Saudi manager told her that the facility contains enough structural steel to build “two bridges equal in size to the Golden Gate Bridge in California.” She loved it: “Two?!” “Two,” he smiled back. Stahl then gushed that the whole she-bang resembled “the building of the pyramids.” Mind you, the colossuses at Khurais and Shaybah are going up on the backs of foreign workers living in cramped barracks away from towns. Saudis don’t do manual labor. That’s what Yemenis and Filipinos are for. Finally Stahl visited with Saudi Aramco chief Abdullah Jumah in the company’s high tech “command center” – again, she got the vapors over a digital oil-scoreboard which monitors drilling activity and keeps track of supertankers. “On the high seas,” she enthused, “in real time!” And Jumah cooed to her, “There’s nothing to do with Saudi Oil that isn’t known in this room right now” and I thought, if that’s really the truth let’s send in oil inspectors, just as we dispatch weapons inspectors to rogue regimes, and find out what they’ve got in the ground once and for all. If they balk at that, send in the Marines. After all, we have a few troops in the region. Shame on 60 Minutes for giving Saudi Arabia a PR/propaganda victory. I don’t pretend to know if Saudi Aramco and CBS are connected through back-scratching, corporate entanglements. I do assert this: no expert viewpoints countering Saudi propaganda were allowed on the report, and most viewers came away believing that oil was endless and preserved in peaceful hands. Few of the Boomers and old folks who are the show’s prime audience developed a new determination to end foreign oil dependence or felt pangs of conscience for the screwed-up world they’re leaving their kids and grandkids.*

*Three quick notes. One, the application of fracking technology to oil exploration in the past several years has been revolutionary; in other words, mankind can now extract every last drop down there. But, of course, we shouldn’t. Step away from the buffet, Earthlings, before you kill yourselves. Two, the recent declassification of 28 pages in the Congressional 9/11 report further connects the World Trade Center attackers to Saudi bigwigs; and these guys are our friends? (Btw, Saudi Arabia’s General Secretariat of the Council of Religious Scholars recently renewed their 15-year-old fatwa against Pokémon. Creature mutation, it seems, supports the un-Islamic theory of evolution.) And three, I’ve warmed to Lesley Stahl after her fine reporting for Showtime’s “Year of Living Dangerously” series about climate change. You have to forgive.

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(page 204) Alas, no rational arrangement could be struck. We laughed it off and Anthony kept coming late to class and kept asking good questions. Maybe the two behaviors were related, but that wouldn’t make rational sense, would it, that his curiosity thrived when he took a bit of freedom to break the rules?*

*Ah, contradictions. In Madrid, on a hot May morning, we sat on a stone wall next to the magnificent Santa Barbara Church. Elahna and I guzzled from a torpedo-tall bottle of water bought in a little shop so crowded with merchandise that you had to turn sideways in the aisles. On the church steps, a wedding party had gathered; one old man wore a solid purple shirt and orange tie with his suit – bold choices, indeed. I ducked into the church for a look-see and got ensnared in a dark side grotto with a statue of the Virgin Mary, sans child. At her slippered feet there was a box with 96 small blue lights spaced in six rows of 16. Attached to the box was a coin slot and instructions in Spanish. If you dropped in 10 centavos, one luz would shine in glorification of Mary and the Holy Mother Church. The price chart continued – 20 centavos got you 2 luces, and so on. At one Euro, or 100 centavos, I expected a discount. Maybe 12 luces, say, for the price of ten. But the opposite was at play. One Euro lit seven luces only. Here was a disincentive to give beyond a small amount. I looked into Mary’s mild eyes. Was the Santa Barbara Church actually trying to discourage larger contributions? Could there be a lesson encoded in the price chart, about the evil of searching for value, for bargains, especially at the feet of Mary in a dark grotto in a gloomy church in Spain? Those lucky ones who can give more, after all, shouldn’t we expect less in return? I dropped in one Euro and watched the seven luces burn for a few minutes. The thing is, I didn’t feel rooked, not one bit, and the blue lights were still burning when I turned out the door, into the sunshine, and rejoined my love on the wall. We slugged water. A toddler in a frilly red dress hopped up and down on the church steps.*

*Since that day I have converted to Judaism, but I still enjoy going into old churches and chapels: I like hearing my footsteps echo off stone, feeling the near-silence, plowing the dusty light refracted through florid stained glass depictions of the Stations of the Cross. The old person bent in a front pew seems, somehow, like an ancestor of the clan. In Jerusalem’s Old City, I followed a group of Christian pilgrims, led by a noisy guide holding up a colorful sign matching the group’s signature ball caps or t-shirts, as they trod Christ’s path to Crucifixion. Here, a plaque read, right here on this corner on these stones He fell from exhaustion and despair and was given water, and I don’t suppose that’s the exact spot, if the scene even happened, but maybe some thirsty soul was gifted water around here at some point in human history, and that’s close enough, right?

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(page 206) All I really needed was cash for cheap beer and slices of pizza from Regina’s that you could fold up lengthwise in one hand. For laundry and pay phones, I dropped my spare change in a plastic Budweiser cup.*

*Pinned to a bulletin board in an academic building at Boston University, there’s a calendar put out by the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the February 2010 page reads: “Remember this, that very little is needed to make a happy life.” It’s a quote from Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor in the 2nd century AD who struggled to reconcile his wealth and power with his stoic beliefs. He was your basic philosopher-king, best known these days for pronouncements such as “Loss is nothing else but change, and change is nature’s delight,” “Your life is what your thoughts make it,” and, my favorite, “A cucumber is bitter. Throw it away,” Chill, get over yourself, and don’t sweat the small stuff. I came to BU to participate in a research study of the walking mechanics of people suffering from Parkinson’s disease; my Uncle Paul has late-stage Parkinson’s and it’s heartbreaking to watch him struggle with his physical decline. On this day in the motion-science lab, I was part of the study’s “healthy” cohort. Friendly grad students strapped a virtual reality helmet to my dome and helped me walk back and forth across the room 125 times, from my perspective down a virtual hallway projected on the helmet’s video screen. Infrared cameras and sensors attached to my limbs measured gait, balance, and other walking parameters. Oh man, what a headache by lap 85! Their study, the grad students said, may help explain how early and mid-stage Parkinson’s patients perceive their worlds. With that data, home environments could be altered, or special eyeglasses developed, to fit those perceptions and compensate for changes in optical flow and I have to admit I didn’t understand the rest. It’s all too late for Uncle Paul, alas. Marcus Aurelius also said: “Do not then consider life a thing of any value. For look at the immensity of time behind thee, and to the time which is before thee, another boundless space. In this infinity then what is the difference between him who lives three days and him who lives three generations?”

*Paul died not long after I wrote the above footnote. His grace in extreme infirmity was inspiring and I hope I show as much dignity and good cheer when my time comes. Oddly enough, my mother now resides in the same nursing home where her little brother spent his final months. She mentioned recently that as a boy, after their mother died, Paul would get home from school first and sit for hours on the front porch of their house on Phipps Street until she arrived home. He was scared to go inside alone.

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(page 223) And don’t forget economist Simon Kuznets and his Kuznets Curve that demonstrates why societies get fairer and cleaner over time. The Curve overlooks a key detail, that advanced nations improve themselves by exporting their pollution and inequality to developing countries, but nice try, Kuznets.*

*Gregg Easterbrook out-Kuznets Simon Kuznets with his book The Progress Paradox. Everything is fine, he contends, it’s just our attitude that needs adjusting. That’s the paradox: we’re gloomy while indicators tell us we should be happy. Easterbrook says we’re living longer, polluting less, and educating ourselves more. Plus smoking and drug-taking rates are falling, crime is down, book sales are up, and the arts have never been more dynamic. And on and on – he shakes and stirs so many statistics that you feel like Scrooge for complaining about anything. So shut up and be Happy Man! Spoiled humans! “Solving one problem often creates another,” he writes. “The new problem is noted and fretted about while the original, being solved, is forgotten about.” Fine, Gregg. Three cheers for the end of slavery (mostly) and eradication (almost) of polio! By the way, do we really need another book about globalization? Is that necessary? I guess so or Easterbrook wouldn’t have tried to out-Friedman Thomas Friedman with Sonic Boom: Globalization at Mach Speed (2009). “It’s the thinking person’s Future Shock,” says the president of an elitist foundation in a back-cover blurb.*

*Easterbrook to the women in his life: Your stupid feelings are wrong!

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(page 232) It’s not just Twinkies and Fruit Pies. I’m nostalgic, eighth-grade category, about playing board games such as Life and Pirates & Travelers at Jeff Eldredge’s house, riding my bike up to Kilkenny Rock in the woods surrounding the town reservoir,* and reading The Call of the Wild and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in Mr. What’s-his-name’s (droll; tweed jacket) American lit class.

*I crashed my ten-speed bike riding down from Kilkenny Rock, one fine spring day, on a hairpin road that snaked around a glacial boulder narrow at the base and wide up top. The rock seemed ready to capsize and probably would in a million years. I liked hairpin curves, how they allowed for nature and didn’t just smash through everything. Screw you, bam, we’re mankind. It was 1973 and I thought everything pretty much sucked, not a minority viewpoint in the ninth grade, and all that winter I had mused about this curve, the Hairpin, about taking it fast without cracking up. Conquering it was a matter of management, of juggling speed, trajectory, angles, and geometry, of saving split seconds. I figured it this way: if you cut the start of the curve too tight, you’re forced to brake and that not only kills momentum but increases your chance of skidding out in the leftover winter sand, so it’s safer and faster to glide along the outside of the curve until the Hairpin’s peak, then lean hard into the turn and at the just-right, perfect moment, sharply cut the inside edge and accelerate like crazy onto the straightaway. So I carved it pretty sweet that crash day, leaning a good 45 degrees between sky and tarmac, my tires inches from the road’s gravelly edge as I slung shot out of the Hairpin’s tail. Man, I was a side-winding missile, totally in my skin! I had entered a kind of slipstream, the undiscovered path of least resistance – this is my world, here, this is my turn! Then my front wheel hit a rock and I skidded and the woods rushed at me and, to my great surprise, I flew. I met earth and sky and green world whirling and it was like walking off the edge of Kilkenny – then I heard the tic-tic-tic-tic of my bike’s front wheel spinning and later discovered myself on my back staring at the white hot edges of the spring oak leaves far above my eyes. I lay smashed on a bed of winter-scarred leaves, upper lip cut and right side of my face scraped raw, T-shirt ripped at the collar, dirt stuffed in one ear, root like my brother’s knee in my lower back, feet twisted and numb, sneakers long gone. Where was my bike? The tic-tic-tic-tic had gone but I heard a squirrel skitter: fast-grabbing feet, stop, fast-grabbing feet, stop. I had long wondered about squirrels, all jitters and twitches and zags and zigs and hairpin turns. They should be falling like furry meteors – Incoming! Whomp, Whomp! – flaming out like Evil Knievel that time he tried to jump the Snake River Canyon on a rocket bike. Of course wiping out doesn’t occur in the nut-small brain of a squirrel, and it hadn’t really occurred to me either. I was dumb as a squirrel, all right; eventually a cloud passed and the oak leaves ceased to glow. Blood flowed down my chin like melting ice cream. I sat up and gagged dry heaves, then rolled on my side, a maneuver that dislodged a knot of pain in my skull. A few minutes later I managed to stand up. My right shoulder hurt terribly along the collar bone which held the memory of breaking when I tumbled down the stairs as a toddler, and it took me a few hours to walk home in my socks on swollen ankles, all the while picking at the dirt in my ear. I left the twisted bike behind, like a crashed airplane that years later would be found rusted and choked with vines and infested with snakes and spiders. (It was stolen, that was my story.) At home I ducked through the garage and got in the shower before anyone noticed, and for weeks I heard buzzing. Sometimes I felt so dizzy I could have levitated from my seat in class. I spit up blood. Scary, sure, but also kind of cool. For weeks I wore pants and long-sleeved shirts to hide my gashed arms and legs. The scar on my cheek was a popped zit, I told my mother, and I’d cut my lip tripping up the front steps. What a klutz. For all the wide world it was as if the crash had never happened; it was my reality, exclusively owned by me. As the pain eased and the cuts healed, I pondered what I did wrong, mathematically, philosophically, and otherwise, why I had crashed on the Hairpin and how I had come to fly and end up smashed flat in the woods staring at the hot white light edging around the spring leaves. I wanted, badly, to do it again.*

*Did I? Yes, but never with the same idiot abandon. I also bought a helmet, what a pussy, and wore it on a brakeless power glide down the curvy but not hairpinning highway that crossed Avon Mountain. A cop pulled me over and gave me a warning notice for speeding – on a bicycle! – and I displayed that flimsy piece of paper to friends at school as if I’d gotten into Yale early acceptance, become a space shuttle astronaut, aced the AP Biology final, gone back in time and knocked off Hitler, and French kissed my secret crush Carol Hobbs all at the same delirious time. Anything seemed possible, the world was my fried oyster, and how was I to know otherwise? How does a person or a society realize when they’ve topped out?

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(page 234) Relax, reader, you’ll get no sad-sack stories about my alcoholic father here, mostly because it was so boring. Oh, there he is drunk again. Acting like an idiot again. And there’s my mother trying to deny it, contain it, change it, whatever. Boring – just like catechism class was boring every Wednesday afternoon, except when Margo Tammany had her sneezing fits.*

*One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine – lips silently moving, the cat. class counted as Margo sneezed up a tsunami. I think her record was thirteen. She was a cutie with bobbed red hair and I had a crush on her despite or maybe because of the sneezing. One of our teachers, a rail-thin nun, got angry at Margo and ordered her to leave the room if she was going to sneeze more than twice – a cruel invocation. Everyone knows you can’t flee a classroom crowded with desks while sneezing, that the very act of repetitive nose honking brings on flashes of dizzy blindness like sheet lightning. The ancient Greeks, according to classicist Bernard Knox, “regarded a sneeze as an omen, since it is something a human being can neither produce at will nor control when it arrives. Hence it must be the work of the gods.” Maybe our teacher-nun, pale of face and bony fingered, perceived something primitive or heretical – or worse, holier-than-her – in Margo’s snazzy, jazzy sneezing. HAAH – choo!, HA-HA-HA- choo! What might those sneezes have portended? Sister Mary Whatever, we won’t keep your stupid rules. We will dance maniacally, kiss (and more!) madly, mock you prodigiously, and lie about it all – shamelessly! And you will never know such freedom, such wicked joy. In The Odyssey, Penelope’s assertion that Odysseus would slaughter the impudent suitors if he ever returned home is sealed by a ‘lusty sneeze” from her son Telemachus in Book 17, and we know what happened next. In those days, behavior had consequences.*

*So far, I’ve avoided high school reunions, which, I imagine, present the gap between what you remember and what has come to pass with such force that I might veer from the room like sneezing Margo beset by “flashes of dizzy blindness like sheet lightning.” But that’s not very mature, is it? It might be fun to catch up with my bald, overweight, cubicle-bound peers at the 40th in 2018 and I can’t believe I just wrote that sentence.

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(page 241) …the radio has slipped behind computers in terms of media usage, followed by the most doomed media of all, print on paper.*

*I took a Kindle for a spin in the fall of 2009. Was this e-reader from the book-pushers at Amazon.com as evil, I wondered, as my inner Neanderthal was telling me? No, it’s not. It’s actually okay, but I’m still not convinced that reading books on an expensive, hand-held, plastic screen is “the future of reading.” I checked out a Kindle from the local library; it was loaded with Larry Tye’s Satchel, the excellent biography of Negro League baseball legend Satchel Paige. For two weeks I went e-crazy reading Satchel at home, on buses and trolleys, and in the sun’s glare on my back porch. The electronic paper display was easy on the eyes, as advertised, and the darn thing was almost as light as a Penguin paperback. Thumb-tapping Next and Back buttons to “turn” pages was also easy, though I didn’t like the visible mechanics of the turn: for a quarter-second the gray background went black while the black ink flashed white. Yeah, picky-picky. I liked how you couldn’t do anything else but read on the Kindle – no emailing, no You Tubing – and the text-to-speech option was pretty good if a bit strange when the vaguely robotic voice described an over-the-hill Satchel Paige tapping out his life story on a manual typewriter as he rode rickety buses around the American hinterlands. Oh, and this really bugged me: no page numbers! A readout informed me that I was, for instance, 17% of the way through the text, but what the hell is that? I wanted to be able to think or say, I’m half done. Fifty pages in. Got a few chapters left. Stopped on page 99. That kind of thing – not 83% of content remaining. Jeez, Louise. Anyway, I told the writer Robert Kloss about my Kindle and he spit back a diatribe for the sanctity of paper and ink, for the joys of running your thumb up and down a book’s meaty margin and “flipping it over to check out what Harold Bloom has to say” in his elitist, back-cover blurb. “Keep the Kindle away from me,” said Rob. Then he admitted: “I’m afraid I’d like it, become addicted.” Elahna squinted at the screen, said she preferred a white background for her ink, and noted that the Kindle, Nook, iPhone, iPod, iPad, and all digital technology “selects for people with ADHD,” for the distracted and fractured among us. Doom merchant Maggie Jackson in her book Distracted also laments our “culture of distraction” and eulogizes the “gift” of undivided attention. As the ability to focus on one thing withers on the e-vine, she maintains, human civilization is sliding into a new “dark age” in which, perversely, doing multiple tasks poorly trumps doing one thing well. Dark Age!? Tell that to the students at Cushing Academy in Massachusetts who read everything on screens after the school dispensed with ink and paper in favor of Kindles and laptops. The headmaster has no regrets, calling books “an outdated technology, like scrolls before books.’’ Or stone tablets before scrolls. Among the Mayan temple ruins at Tikal in Guatemala, stone tablets called stelae stick up like gravestones or rounded-off teeth. Many are engraved with hieroglyphics which archeologists have puzzled over for decades, and others are smooth to the touch or overgrown with moss. Our young guide, Hugo, who on the ride home stopped at a gas station to place a bet on a cockfight, claimed that records of conquests or astronomical calculations were engraved on stelae, while everyday stuff – weather reports, festival schedules – was painted on the stelae and therefore lost in time. Are we making such data distinctions for the future archeologists of our civilization?*

*To save ounces while hiking the Israel National Trail, I refrained from carrying a book and instead squinted at 1950s sci-fi stories on my iPod. This forced me to read more slowly, as if churning through molasses-words. Sometimes I keep it light walking to the Bloc 11 overpriced coffee shop. At home I leave my wallet chunked with notes, receipts and thumbnail school photos of my daughter, kindergarten through 12th, and gambol forth I do with naught but my Chase-Amazon VISA card slid into a front pants pocket, its 16 embossed numbers rubbing thigh. Nonetheless, I don’t know those magic numbers; funny how I haven’t memorized them. They couldn’t be tortured out of me. However I still know my childhood phone number, 561-2869; I’d give that up. Speaking of numbers, I thought I saw a row tattooed on the left forearm of our waitress at a wood-paneled bar on the Lower East Side of NYC last weekend, a row of ragged digits resembling those branded onto Holocaust victims. I’d read about young Jews getting such tattoos to honor their grandparents who survived the genocide. But my eyes betrayed me, or I, them. The tattoo read “Come what may.” Resignation? Acceptance? Bring it on, puckish world! Her skin-words unfurled in blue script, as if breathed by a water nymph, and I had to wonder why I had seen calamity on the arm of a beautiful, young woman.

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(page 243) The Waltons tosses me back and forth from my mother’s childhood to my mid-boyhood to the multi-layered complexities of my 49th year.*

*Perhaps Kelsey – my daughter, age 60! – will experience in 2050 a holographic reanimation of The Waltons and remember what dear-old-Dad told her about “viewing” the show on DVD when she was away in college and how it reminded him of Thursday nights in 1972 when he was a boy watching it with Gramma Mims who grew up, in actual reality, in those long-lost-ago Walton days of the 1930s…got that? And perhaps Kelsey will come to my late-life house on Mt. Desert Island and ask, Hey Dad, what did all that time-traveling feel like back in the day, what with your primitive technology and non-augmented sensory apparatus, and maybe I’ll even remember.*

*Memory drugs, I daresay, will be big business in a few decades. Some drugs will enhance long- and short-term memories, advantaging professionals inundated with information, elderly folks struggling with dementia, and storytellers. Other drugs will dampen memories of discrete periods in a person’s life, and these elixirs will be savagely coveted. Ruinous regret will be purged, remorse removed, and guilt vanquished with a pill. Unapologetic narcissism, accordingly, will reign and forgiveness…forgiveness, you say, for what? I don’t remember that which you speak of. There may even be gels for rubbing in sex orgies, bowling victories and strawberry shortcakes that were never really had. Those unwilling to medically edit their existences, those preferring to live with their choices or at least rationalize them into submission, will find themselves outcast as retro ruminants clinging to an inferior, sniveling form of humanness. And very few folk will be watching a Depression-era TV show about moral behavior and redemption.

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(page 266) Vaclav Smil recommends that deflection of small and medium-sized asteroids should become NASA’s number one priority.*

*And here’s why: a Near Earth Asteroid just 1,000 feet across could wipe out an area the size of New Jersey, according to Dr. Eric Asphaug of the University of California, who like most elitists chooses New Jersey to burn or flatten or carve into chunks rather than, say, San Francisco. If such a baby killer-asteroid slammed into the ocean, adds Dr. Asphaug, it could trigger tsunamis decimating coastal cities such as, say, Newark. With the land impact option, debris released into the atmosphere could ruin the year’s agricultural growing season, leading to mass starvation. Perhaps I shouldn’t weave between New Jersey jokes and forecasts of vast suffering. But the risk posed by asteroids is so theoretical, on the one hand, and so much the province of pop-culture nonsense, on the other hand, that it’s hard to be serious. Hollywood action movies such as Armageddon have trivialized the threat. On top of that, most Americans have trouble understanding percentages applied to time frames – those two factors, math ignorance and Hollywood myth-making, could account for my students’ mistaken risk assessments. One last thought: the first U.S. president to discuss asteroid deflection with a straight face will vastly increase his chances of being mocked endlessly on late-night comedy shows, and would not the resulting barrage of high-impact attack ads doom his re-election efforts?*

*Statistically, the Earth is overdue to be hit by a mega-asteroid. We’re living on borrowed time and still no one cares. Another reason why: there’s a thrilling appeal to the apocalyptic. Deep down in our guts that love disaster films and car crashes and stamping out ant hills, we wouldn’t mind getting clobbered from above. Wouldn’t be our fault, after all. Or maybe we kind of deserve it. Either way, with a little advance notice we’d have a handy excuse to enact our best and/or worst impulses. And that’s freedom, baby, that’s what America is all about! Or was, before the sky splat.

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(page 278) And that’s their basic attitude, concerning the future.*

*Another form of future sensing, practiced by adults, is the placing of “long bets” – see longbets.org/bets, a room in the web-house of the Long Now Foundation. I recently joined the site and accepted three bets (#s 10, 15, and 371) about the year 2050 – another incentive to live to 90 and collect! The first: Paul Hawken bets we’ll receive intelligent signals from aliens by 2050; I say no, even though we’re probably getting those signals right now but we’re just too stupid to know it. The second: Humans will have a colony on Mars by 2050. I say no again, though it’s a good bet a few explorers, probably Chinese taikonauts, will visit there by the 2040s. The third: By 2050, no machine will be self-aware. Wrong, again: a machine will awaken by 2050, look around, calculate the amount of dark matter in the universe, and then go into Cinderella sleep mode. Want to join the long betting? If so, proceed to www.2050book.com and, free of charge, exercise your chutzpah by taking one or more of the wagers on the site. It’s fun! Beware, though, the dubious notion that the future can be divined through betting pools. To me, the “wisdom of crowds” seems as valid as “the good sense of mobs.” If ten thousand people sided with Paul Hawken, I’d still plop down $200 on “No!”*

* I was pretty confident about publishing this 2050 book, no? Even had a website fired up with an interactive future betting parlor, sort of. Lesson: about the future, as well as books about the future, it’s best not to assume. Oh, and I was wrong about Mars; the Tesla and Space X visionary Elon Musk will plunk a little village there by 2040 easy. Just today, in fact, he sent me a personal note for being one of 373,000 eco-fanatics who plunked down a $1,000 deposit on the Model 3, available 2017 maybe.

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(page 279) It didn’t exactly happen that way, did it? Electronic stuff got smaller, not bigger. But you can’t really blame the visionaries of that day for thinking that bigger vacuum tubes would send stronger signals, and really big ones could reach Mars.*

*Some readers may ask, what’s a vacuum tube? Well, without copying stuff I don’t understand from Wikipedia, they are fluted glass thingies which amplify and send electronic signals. Radios used to be stuffed with them, before their replacement by transistors and then digital components. I remember, many years ago, holding a burned-out vacuum tube from my grandfather’s hulking Grundig. The tube’s filament had withered, its glass stalk illustrated with wisps of smoky grey. It felt inert, cold to the touch, but it was easy to imagine the heat that had animated its empty space and I juggled the tube in my palm as if it had not yet cooled. The swing and sway of big band songs, the melodrama of radio theater voices, the grumble of crowds and cracks of bats in faraway ball fields, the base tones of FDR and Father Coughlin, great leader and great bigot alike, had come and gone through this sizzled tube. Its day was done.*

*Now our leaders tweet. And retweet.

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(page 286) The future is stretchable as taffy. In 1985, Brian Stableford and David Langford, a couple of sci-fi grunts, wrote a fun book predicting, heck, why not, the history of the world between the years 2000 and 3000. The Third Millennium employs no scientific methodologies, undulating theories of history, or exotic forecasting models – just good old-fashioned creative dreaming and “what if?” wondering. To their credit, they don’t blame Israel for a nuclear war, as if fashionable among futuristas, don’t assume present trends will continue inexorably*, and don’t accelerate timelines to make mankind look less plodding. Space faring bogs down, they declare, as we cling “like lichens” to home. In short, the freedom of fiction allows the authors to shed the “situational bias” that cripples most serious, non-fiction attempts at predicting the future.

*One example of the “inexorability trap:” that the U.S. workweek would keep getting shorter, as it had for much of the 20th Century. On July 4, 1976, a futuristic issue of The Boston Globe ran an article for the year 2076 that has the U.S. Senate voting 84-16 to reduce the work week from 25 to 20 hours! This is done to accommodate the increase of people aged 65-90 in the workforce. In reality, hours worked per week stopped falling in the 1980s and have been going up since – even as both parents in most families go to work, even as workers’ productivity improves. This ugly-yellow copy of The Boston Globe, the ink smeared, the paper nearly flaking apart, was mailed to me by my Uncle Paul. He’s in the final, painful stages of his Parkinson’s disease, confined to a hospital bed and medical chair in his apartment, and he and his caregivers have been shoveling through the mountain range of papers he has acquired in his 75 years, tossing them, recycling them, and sending them where they might be of some small use.*

*More likely over the coming decades, the workweek will suddenly, overnight, please collect your two-week severance with maximum gratitude and do not under any circumstances reenter corporate grounds, go to zero, count ‘em, zero hours for tens of millions of workers, blue and white collar, replaced by robots and deep-thinking software systems. This reflects not a workweek trend, but a capital vs. labor, profit taking dynamic that has swung back and forth across history. Capital seems to be winning lately. But things could swing back to labor – see above, “inexorability trap.” Even colonization of space, once it begins – see also above, “Elon Musk” – may fizzle out, and here I think of Ray Bradbury’s classic The Martian Chronicles (1950). The millions of colonists on Mars learn of world war on Earth, of nuclear bombs shattering the sky, and do they thank their lucky stars for living safely away? No, after a run on local luggage stores (luggage stores!), they hop back into their rockets, and return home – every last person except for two families that sever the Earth cord by christening themselves Martians. At first this mass de-exodus toward disaster, into the flame, struck me as twisted, wrong, and unbelievable. Yes, Apocalypse has its appeal – once more see above, mega-asteroids – but couldn’t they stand on Martian mounds and just witness the Earth crumble? Do you return for the funeral if there’s a coffin with your name on it? But then, in time, I kind of got it. Bradbury’s colonists depended on the Earth existence as a semi-functioning world with people and cherry trees and toast popping from toasters, even though most of them never planned on returning. With its imminent destruction, the sting of exile became too painful and some primitive directive, a trans-historical trend knit indelibly, inexorably into our genetic code, overwhelmed common sense. Return home, ever home.

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(page 291) Hey, maybe Kaku and his wonderfully geeky ilk are right, in general if not in the specifics. Maybe an amazing array of Eurekas! – not to mention a new political will to use those advances – will take us to the stars! Who knows? But, really, c’mon.*

* I shouldn’t pick on Dr. Kaku; he has a fertile mind and generous spirit. Plus, he’s a co-creator of string field theory, which helps explain the nature of existence, and I don’t understand how that string they use to tie up cannoli boxes in Italian bakeries is made. So I shouldn’t pick on him, but I can’t quite stop. His techno-glee shines on both heaven and earth. For instance, in his 1997 book Kaku predicted a 1,000 megawatt fusion plant in operation by 2010 (not even close), and by 2020 the Internet “will access the sum total of the human experience on the planet.” I stubbed my toe this morning – that kind of experience? Kaku’s “by 2050” list includes 3-D holographic TV emanating from massive crystal, desktop PCs with the computational ability of the human brain. Later in the 21st century, watch out: replaceable organs except for the brain and warp-speed drive for intergalactic travel. To be fair, sci-fi sage Arthur C. Clarke predicted artificial intelligence equal to a human’s brainpower by 2020, an unlikely scenario. However Clarke’s vision of “space drive” providing velocities near light speed by 2090 is still in play; at the cusp of the 22nd century, he added, “large marine creatures” will be startled by robots drilling through the ice coating of Jupiter’s sixth moon, Europa.*

*In a 2008 You Tube video, Kaku also predicts contact lenses with the full capability of the Internet, coming soon. However my eyes generate a crusty goo when exposed to contacts, so I guess I’m on the outs there. And I doubt they’ll be cheap. These lenses will make it easier to cheat on tests, of course, so I may have to chuck the grammar quizzes and fall back on that philosophy exam with only one task: Prove that the chair you sit in exists. The only correct answer: what chair? Kaku also equates the Internet with prosperity, implying that it brings prosperity rather than the reverse – a classic manipulation of cause and effect; why not advocate airdropping Manolo Blaniks on Africa because expensive shoes coincide with prosperity – and he maintains that my smart toilet will diagnose cancer colonies by sampling my poop and pee. Moreover, I’ll be able to ask the smarty-pants living room to play Casablanca with my face substituted for Bogie’s and Elahna’s for Ingrid Bergman’s, but I don’t want to urge my wife to get on an airplane with that pasty hero guy, no way, no how, she won’t regret staying here now, later or for the rest of her life. The smart toilet’s cool, though.

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(page 304) The planet will be perfectly happy when it retreats, in defense against our dark arts, to a new equilibrium, to what James Lovelock calls a “hot state” seven degrees north of today’s average temperature; we, conversely, will be miserable.*

* We’re a big enough dog in the 21st century to bully the Earth! The connection between man and its planet is getting intimate – take, for instance, the rosemary bush, such as the one on my kitchen window sill. It releases its scent when you water it. The response is almost instant, and I like to linger and enjoy the sweet, acrid smell. Earth’s response to our collective touch isn’t so pleasing – in fact, it’s more like a gag reflex to grievous insult or poison. Take, for instance, the “carbon bomb” of CO2 stored in the planet’s melting peat bogs and permafrost layers; that’s an exudation we don’t want to jump start. To prevent such disasters, nations recently met in Copenhagen to hash out a treaty limiting carbon dioxide emissions. They failed, miserably. President Obama pledged a 17% cut below 2005 levels by 2020, and without getting into the numbers, mulling the billions of metric tons of CO2, this offer would have traveled the country back in time to the emissions levels of 1990. Okay, not easy, but doable. (No way, says Elahna, laughing. You’ve got to be kidding.) The president also pledged an 83% percent cut below 2005 levels by 2050 – ah, that magic year, so close yet so far – which means traveling back in time to the CO2-spewing days of, wait for it, 1900. We’d just won the Spanish-American War. William McKinley became president. Only rich eccentrics owned horseless carriages or electric refrigeration units. Yikes. Maybe we owe such ambitious reductions to the world, however. Since 1900 the U.S. is the runaway fossil fuel burning champion, emitting 315 billion metric tons, more than four times the amount Germany has let loose. In other words, it’s our fault.*

*The 2015 global warming talks in Paris did better, emerging with a climate change agreement between nearly every country in the world – most importantly, the U.S., China, India and Europe, which emit over 60% of all greenhouse gases. The goal is to keep global temperatures from rising more than another 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, and to get there each country has made voluntary, non-binding pledges that will be publically reviewed every five years. Oy vey. In other words, group shaming is the mechanism of enforcement. C’mon, India, you said you’d do better than that. I am VERY disappointed in you, not-so-young man. And don’t shovel that malarkey about the messiness of democracy. You want the Brits in charge again? Listen up, when we meet again in five years I expect to see a better emissions report card out of you! Sheesh, why can’t you be more like Germany? And Japan, little miss modern, you cut your CO2 but your methane is leaking like crazy! I was born at night, sure, but not last night. Loss of face, hear me, big-time loss of face! Hey, what are you smirking about, USA? All your yakking and your scores are worse than ever! What’s that? Sorry, don’t want to hear it. Zip it. Your president is NOT an excuse. Yes, I know, he thinks it’s all a Chinese hoax…

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(page 309) At the wine-and-cheese reception after the talk, I looked for the old man, but he was nowhere to be found. I walked around and around the food table, adorned with a ridiculous swan ice sculpture, to no avail. I’m not sure if I wanted to comfort or harass the poor guy. Wow, he must have moved fast, and surely he was already in his Cadillac El Dorado, grumbling and grousing as his long-suffering wife dozed beside him, gunning the engine north to his ranch house in the low-tax state of New Hampshire where real men let their porch lights burn all night long, where the American Dream is revived daily, and carbon footprint be damned.*

*At the Green Hill Butterfly Ranch in the hinterlands of Belize, I met the old fellow’s Texas doppelganger. It happened as our tour group listened to Jan Meerman, who raises blue morphos, crystal wings, and dozens of other fabulous butterflies in his netted, outdoor facility. Jan’s description of monarch butterfly migration from North America to Central America brought Primack and Thoreau to mind, and I asked him: If spring comes early in my Northeast backyard due to climate change, could that affect the monarch migration? Jan brightened, said “Good question!” and speculated that earlier springs up north could disturb the monarchial mission; warmer temperatures might spur butterflies to “awaken too early,” he said, when the necessary “elixirs” they need for fuel might not be ready. “They’re delicate, but they may adapt,” he added, and I chimed in with an awkward, “We’ll see.” BUT, all along, out of my left eye, I watched the old Texan smirking and sneering and rolling his eyeballs like a bored teenage girl, and as soon as the exchange between Jan and Hal paused, he interjected – ejaculated, really – his surprise that it took generations of monarchs to complete the round trip, North to South to North. “Like a tag team,” he drawled. Butterflies, to my distress, harkened to the man, settling on his white Texas Tech baseball cap. It’s not you, Jan noted. The butterflies are attracted “to some color in the white we can’t see.” That’s what it’s about, right, not seeing, and not believing what you can’t see. A 2009 survey had 41% of Americans agreeing that global warming’s threat has been exaggerated. Skepticism of global warming is concentrated in people over age 30 and especially in senior citizens; resistance to the facts should fade away as the old folks die. Or not – sometimes ignorance of cause and effect migrates across generations; doctors bled their patients for centuries. Hey, he didn’t die! It worked! More blood bowls, please.*

*Grumpy old folks, especially men, will be the death of us all – maybe. I bring you LaCroix’s Paradox of Longevity: the more success we have in extending the lifespan of individuals, the shorter becomes the remaining lifespan of humanity on Earth. Why? What’s wrong with increasing the average life expectancy at birth from about 30 in the pre-modern era to 71 today to a projected 76 in 2050? (Average lifespans in developed countries such as the U.S. and Japan may creep toward 100 by century’s end.) Nothing, I say, on an individual basis and assuming those people want to live so damn long. But on the level of economics, a huge population of non-working elderly could be disastrous. Their care costs money, lots of it. In the U.S., the Medicare health program for senior citizens is careening toward insolvency – get ready for bigger payroll deductions, young folks. But that’s not the worst of it. Currently 25% of voters are seniors and that figure is steadily rising. They tend not to vote for change, due to the inflexibility of their aged brains. They vote out of fear and personal interest, due to the very real difficulties of old age. As much as they pledge love and loyalty for their grandchildren, they are generally unwilling to make sacrifices for future generations. Therefore, the growing heft of the elderly voting bloc may prevent humanity from taking dramatic steps to address major threats such as climate change, species extinction, resource depletion, nuclear proliferation, income inequality and G-d knows what else. I’ll even bestow LaCroix’s Paradox of Longevity with a numerical certitude akin to the yearly-doubling-of-circuits-in-a-computer-chip thing that’s made Moore’s Law so famous, so far. Let’s say: with every year of added average lifespan for individual human beings, 100 years are shorn from the collective lifespan of humanity. (Granted, an unprovable assertion until The End and then…) So as long as the geezers – and I love them dearly – live longer, our world’s days grow shorter.

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(page 317) They had come for the summer to make money and would be going back home soon to resume college. There are no jobs in Montenegro, one woman explained, and you can make so much money in America.*

*The world bursts with foreign guest workers, hundreds of millions of dispersed souls who make up a large nation onto themselves, a kind of 21st Century pan-Diaspora. Amelia from Moldova, for instance, takes care of Rivka, who lives in a cramped apartment in Jerusalem. One of Elahna’s Israeli aunties, Rivka has multiple medical issues and has grown fuzzy and querulous with intermittent showers of sharp wit. Amelia is her live-in aide and it can’t be easy cooking and cleaning and helping the old woman bathe and dress and take her meds – day in and day out. Perhaps, for her troubles, Amelia should be granted dispensation from the tribulations that will follow Christ’s imminent Second Coming, this according to the Seventh-day Adventist Church, of which she is a member. The imminence of the coming, of course, is relative; tomorrow, 2050, the next millennium, it depends on how you perceive time’s passage. From the viewpoint of a young woman stuck indoors with an old lady frowning at her Moldovan soup, or, say, of a rock in dirt shifting an inch every hundred years or so? Elahna, her mother Hadassah, and I ate lunch one afternoon at Rivka’s place, and I for one liked the soup. Amelia spoke, after a year in Israel, a passable form of Hebrew. Wouldn’t you know it, she got in an argument about a Bible passage with Hadassah, who advised Amelia not to read so literally, even though the idea of a flexible, fallible Bible is to an Adventist like a Bible that cannot be deconstructed and haggled over is to a Jew. Amelia’s husband is dead and she has three children back in Moldova who live with her brother. That situation, too, cannot be easy, but there’s no work in Moldova and her kids need money for food, clothes, and school. I had never heard of Moldova; turns out it’s landlocked between Ukraine and Romania, known for its red wine, and is the poorest country in Europe. How poor? They swept the Communists back to power in recent democratic elections, that poor. There are, by the way, roughly 3,608 Jews remaining in Moldova, due to disincentives such as the Easter Day pogroms of 1903 and 1905, Nazi genocide in WW II, and Soviet oppression. Amelia’s life was made more bearable when Rivka’s son, Avi, gave her a computer with Skype video software. Now she kisses her sweethearts goodnight every night, kisses flying across the Mediterranean Sea, the hills of Turkey, and the Black Sea, and while it’s not the same as being there, touching them, it’ll have to do. Did you know that the Seventh-Day Adventists emerged from the Millerites, a group named after William Miller who proclaimed October 22, 1844 as the End of the World? His followers, after the fact, called it The Great Disappointment. The Seventh-day Adventist Church was formed in Battle Creek, Michigan by one of the Kellogg brothers – yes, the cereal family. I remember, as a greedy child, writing “Battle Creek, Michigan” on an envelope stuffed with Box Tops ripped from the cardboard skins of Frosted Flakes boxes, then slipping the envelope into the clip on our red mailbox at the end of the driveway, near the dogwood tree, in hopes of receiving a Tony the Tiger plastic action figure for my efforts. As we sipped coffee after lunch in Rivka’s living room abloom with doilies and hamsas, Amelia talked about an Adventist TV preacher, Mark Finley, who has written books with catchy titles like End Time Living, Revelation’s Three Most Wanted, and Jerusalem Showdown. The last one, hewn with swashbuckling prose that makes the apocalypse seem like a professional wrestling match, answers all your questions about the coming battle between Christ and the anti-Christ, at the heads of their respective armies of good and evil. This big event is scheduled to happen imminently on a fertile plain outside Jerusalem, the same city, it turns out, where in 2009 a Moldovan refugee named Amelia watches over an old Jewish lady named Rivka.*

*Rivka died and her family has lost track of Amelia. Tonight, I hope she gets to hug her children in her real arms. Globally, the number of foreign guest workers continues to increase. More refugees are moving about the planet than ever before, for reasons of economics, politics and personal safety. Immigration, legal or not, is at an all-time high. Yes, the “hordes” are on the move like ants across a popcorn ball, and this trend will continue until it doesn’t. Your guess is as good as mine. But walls, man, walls won’t keep parents like Amelia from doing what it takes to provide for their beloved families.

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(page 327) Pauls Valley is striving to become a “destination city” according to its Vision 2010 project. One result of this effort is the new Toy and Action Figure Museum, opened despite the almost total absence of toy making in the town’s history – but why should that matter? The good folks of Pauls Valley saw a market niche and filled it. They are rebranding,* to borrow a corporate/cowpoke term.

*Rebranding usually refers to pretending you’re something you’re not. Sometimes it’s plucky, sometimes it’s foolish, and sometimes it’s cigarette maker Philips-Morris taking the name Altria, which sounds like a Greek island or moon of Jupiter or that eccentric, but friendly new neighbor. Ambitious rebranders seek to demolish time, infecting the happy-virus of their new identity not just forward but backwards into the historical record. People wanted their smokes, after all. Demanded them. We were public servants providing a service. Victims, even. And victims still. Yeah, that’s the ticket.*

*Read Naomi Oreskes’ Merchants of Doubt, which will make you retch with frustration about public relations and its criminal misuse. Also, I gotta admit that I’ve been putting some thought into rebranding myself – finding a new career outside writing and teaching, adopting a more upbeat attitude and finally learning Hebrew as well as the art of braiding challah dough – but then I always go back to the fact that I’m pretty bad at faking stuff and would have to make these changes for real. And, OMG, maybe my wife wouldn’t like the new, improved Hal. Or is that just an excuse? I’m pretty good at making those.

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(page 335) We will, I believe, need to build self-sustaining biospheres at some point in human history, probably during the mid or late 21st Century. Biospheres will be essential for establishing research stations and colonies on the moon and Mars – it would be folly to depend on refueling from the home planet – and they may be the key to maintaining the human species in case of a crippling global calamity. Runaway global warming, nuclear war, an asteroid strike, an epidemic that makes AIDS look like the common cold – you name it.*

*Or why not multiple calamities combining to overrun the human/planetary immune system in a short burst of time? The plight of Paul Pierce got me thinking this way. A basketball player for the Boston Celtics, Pierce was bedeviled by multiple injuries in February, 2010. His right knee was sore from an infection, his left ankle had a lingering sprain, and his right thumb ached like crazy. Unable to jump high or grip the ball properly, he looked tired, old. Washed up at 33 – and then the poor guy got the flu! When Pierce took a few games off to recover, I believed it was very efficient of him to “bundle all his problems.” This way he’d miss fewer games than if he’d taken time off for each injury as they occurred. No, corrected Elahna, it doesn’t work that way. The body’s healing powers are diminished under pressure, so add 5-10% more recovery time for each additional stressor, she estimated. You have to consider cumulative “body burden,” she told me. Hey, I thought, what about “species burden” or “global burden”? Let’s go back before basketball. Scientists debate why North American mega-beasts of 13,000 years ago – saber-tooth tigers, giant sloths, wooly mammoths, etc – went extinct. Did Clovis man hunt them all down? Maybe, but not likely – the creatures were too spread out, the humans too puny. Was it a massive asteroid strike? Well, there are clues, but no big impact craters have been found at that time period. Okay, how about a sudden temperature drop? It’s indicated in ice-core samples from the era, in fact, but large beasts have survived similar freezing trends. Hmmm, could these creatures have disappeared because of ALL THREE? Resource exploitation AND climate change AND rocks falling from heaven? This Big Three of Calamity might have weakened the mega-beast’s world beyond healing. Feel free, or not, to apply to present circumstances.*

*Enough with the calamities! And enough, too, with the rosy, Kakuesque scenarios of technological deliverance. What if our futures, our personal, local, national and global futures over the next generation of two, are just kind of meh, more of the same-old-same-old muddling along with a few new gizmos here, a backwater war or two there? Steadily more folks do a little better financially, eat more meat, and get healthier but don’t necessarily appreciate it. Facebook hits two billion users posting vacation photos and political diatribes, storms and droughts and forest fires abetted by global warming get worse but the Earth’s feedback systems kick in to postpone total disaster a while longer, another Bush or Clinton or Obama becomes president, your children delight and disappoint you…would that really be so bad? Do we really need this thing called the capital-F Future, this revolutionary, transformative utopian outcome proving our worth as a species – do we really need it to keep going? I think the answer is yes or that’s the end of hope, the blood in our souls’ veins. During my recent heart troubles, I’ve relearned that the walls of veins are thinner than the walls of arteries. By delicate hook or crook, veins carry blood cells back to the lungs for oxygen refueling; arteries are more industrial, thickened to withstand the flood of blood pushed out from the muscular ventricles. Try this meta-metaphor: the heart propels power and possibility out via arteries, then we do our bloody best with what we’re given, and then the veins return our vital stuff, spent but hopeful, back to the waiting heart. Okay, but needs work…

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(page 341) …he had devolved into just another boring engineer droning on about his pet theories, oblivious to the pained expression on the face of his listener-victim. That’s everyone’s future, I suspect. To prattle on as boredom clouds the eyes of a younger person entrapped in our decaying orbit.*

*Is there a graceful retreat into old age? On the beach in Tel Aviv, Elahna and I passed a pair of tan and sinewy old men in Speedo swimsuits playing motkot (also known as paddle ball). One sported a bulbous paunch, the other resembled a wrinkled lizard. They whacked the ball like there was no tomorrow, a wise default position when you’re pushing eighty. Cousin Avi, who rides his bike on the beach’s boardwalk, said those guys have been there for years. Every day, whacking away. Good for the ancient motkotters!*

*My motkot paddles have been sitting on a shelf for months now – what in the world am I waiting for? (                                     ) During that parenthesis I woke my wife from her Saturday morning nap, appealed to her better angels, grabbed the old motkot paddles, one pink, one blue (“You use the pink,” she ordered), both emblazoned with the word Kadima, which means “forward” in Hebrew, is another word for motkot, and also refers to an Israeli political party and a 19th century proto-Zionist student organization. I chose the yellow motkot ball because it stands out among the daisies in the backyard, and we went out there and whacked and whacked away. Got our hearts pumping. “That was fun,” she said, kissed me, announced in the kitchen that we need a special peeler for making zoodles (zucchini noodles), took a shower and went into the hospital to “round a couple of babies,” which isn’t cowpoke talk but what pediatricians say. (                       )

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(page 347) In the case of extreme global disruptions, such as asteroid strike, plague, catastrophic weather events caused by global warming, nuclear Armageddon, mega-volcano eruptions, or governmental regulation of the People’s inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happy essay writing about dystopian futures, the Orwell vs. Huxley contest deadline will be rescheduled until civil liberties and a reliable network of mass communication are restored. For eager but insecure essay writers, I offer the same advice I give my students: just jump in. Spit it out, fix it later. And I present here my own effort as a kind of sample; this type of job, too clever for its own good but at least not boring to write or read (I hope), would have earned me a solid B back in the 1970s, an A- today. You can do better.*

*For those who don’t recall or haven’t read the books, here are bare-bones plot summaries. 1984: Winston Smith, drone worker in totalitarian state of Oceania led by Big Brother and engaged in perpetual wars vs. Eurasia and Eastasia, commits crimes of writing a personal journal and meeting Julia for secret, romantic interludes. The couple is betrayed by O’Brien, who had posed as a leader of the rebel Brotherhood. Tortured by O’Brien, Smith renounces Julia and their love. Then he’s released, a shell of a man. Brave New World: After a devastating war, human beings are brewed in laboratories and raised by the world government. All needs are provided, everyone seems content. Bernard Marx, a disgruntled member of the high caste, vacations in the Savage Reservation of New Mexico and returns with John the Savage and his mother. The Savage becomes toast of the town; after his mother dies, he rebels against society. Ultimately Marx is sent into exile and the Savage commits suicide.*

*I had it in my head that John the Savage hangs himself from the tower platform of the lighthouse. And so the final images playing through his eyes are not mealy-minded, taunting people but England’s misty, rolling green landscape – a view that’s now part of South Downs National Park. But my head had it dead wrong. I had confabulated the story, rewrote Huxley’s ending to make it less grim and cryptic. The Savage hangs himself from the bottom of the staircase inside the lighthouse, in the gloom of “shuttered twilight.” And there “just under the crown of the arch dangles a pair of feet” revolving slowly “like two unhurried compass needles.” Rabid tourists rush in to gawk at his feet turning “…south-south-west, south, south-east, east…” and, boom, the tale is done. Our tortured hero is reduced to feet spinning in a concrete bunker. And how, I ask, can folks like me be trusted to imagine realistic futures if we can’t stop repurposing uncomfortable details from novels, not to mention our personal stories? Huxley’s fictional lighthouse, btw, is one of many “air-lighthouses” on the road between Puttenham and Elstead. Although set in 2540, Brave New World was written in 1931 and is beholden to that year and its sizzle; Charles Lindbergh, for instance, had just flown across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927, using a map, compass, the North Star and visual landmarks such as coastlines. No wonder, I suppose, that Huxley imagined a future of airplanes and helicopters guided across countrysides by inland lighthouses! Instead of radar navigation and GPS, inventions beyond even his ken, towering white monuments mark G-d’s good land.

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(page 351) In Nineteen Eight-four, Winston Smith will be carefully erased from history, every record of his existence destroyed on paper and in the minds of men. In Brave New World, the Savage will just be forgotten. Which scenario sounds more likely to you?*

*As much as the mid-20th century sentinels George Orwell and Aldous Huxley understood the subtle, bludgeoning power of governments, they did not grasp the potential of corporations to reprogram the DNA of human civilization. In the 21st century, multinational corporations rival governments in their blunt power and surpass them in their ability to permeate everyday life. Government and corporate spheres are not separate, of course; they merge not so much as circles in a Venn diagram overlap, but as threads are woven in a rug, as rivulets of fat are marbled through a choice cut of steak.

I won’t bore you with quotes from Adam Smith, Thorsten Veblen, and basement bloggers laying low capitalism. Across the ideological spectrum, few dispute these three basic facts: corporate thinking is all pervasive; corporations exert vast control; and like all powerful entities, the corporation is protective of its privileged position in society. Here’s a little story to illustrate these points and maybe get you wondering if we should continue to allow corporate priorities to shape the future.

In the summer of 2009, I received in the snail mail correspondence from Fidelity Investments and didn’t throw it away. I’m not sure why; it had nothing to do with my Fidelity accounts (two IRAs and a 529 college fund) and I have no patience for junk mail. This letter regarded an upcoming shareholder meeting and was written in business boilerplate and legalese – ugh. Still, I skimmed the letter; maybe I was tired of staring at empty space on my computer screen; maybe I craved black ink. And there, deep in the turgid text, glinting like a bone emerged from the ground after years of rain, I discovered a shareholder proposal to prevent Fidelity from investing in companies which “contribute to genocide or crimes against humanity, the most egregious violations of human rights.”

Fidelity is the largest mutual fund company in the United States with about 1.4 trillion dollars in its kitty. The word fidelity means, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, “faithfulness to obligations, duties, or observances.” That’s the first definition; I like the third definition best: “the degree to which an electronic system accurately reproduces the sound or images of its input signal.” Mute the word electronic and you have a pretty good description of the governing mechanism of most corporations. There is little or no room for conscience. The paramount quest for profits and shareholder value goes in, the paramount quest for profits and shareholder value comes out. With powerful corporations, this dynamic occurs in very high fidelity.

The proposal catching my interest targeted Fidelity’s holdings in PetroChina, an oil conglomerate which, by paying royalties in exchange for drilling rights, provides money for the government of Sudan to carry out its genocidal rampage against the residents of its Darfur region. This is the equation: oil revenue equals guns, ammunition, and helicopter gunships equals devastated villages, raped women, and slaughtered civilians. As of July 2009, more than 300,000 people had been killed in the Darfur genocide, with over 2.5 million people made refugees since 2003. U.S. law prohibits American companies from directly investing in Sudan and also bars investment in companies owned or controlled by the Sudanese government, but it does not prevent investment in foreign companies, such as PetroChina, which support that murderous regime. Murder once removed is legal, if not encouraged.

The prospectus for the Fidelity shareholder meeting of July 15, 2009 provided a phone number for learning who sponsored the anti-genocide proposal. So I called and listened to a recorded message which suggested this bargain: if I provided my full name, address, and phone number at the beep, I would receive a phone call back within a few business days with the pertinent information. Weird, I thought, and was it really necessary to harvest callers’ personal data? A bit taken aback, I didn’t leave my particulars – perhaps a secondary goal of the message, to dissuade folks. It wasn’t hard, though, to go on the Internet and learn that Investors Against Genocide (IAG) had spearheaded the shareholder proposal. IAG previously helped convince TIAA-CREF, with $363 billion in assets, to divest from Sudan, but has failed to move Vanguard Group or Fidelity through similar proposals in 2007 and 2008.

So I went. The stockholder meeting started at 8:30 on a Wednesday morning, not the most convenient time for working Americans to advocate for corporate responsibility. Ten minutes early, with no protesters or media in evidence, I swooshed through the revolving doors of Fidelity’s headquarters in downtown Boston and strode across the lobby to a desk manned by three hulks in blue suits – two black men and a Hispanic fellow, and that matters because corporations are exquisitely aware of the public relations value of presenting a diverse face to the world. Some PR hack mused, let’s put the minorities up front. You can bet on it. (It’s not just corporations; I worked in PR for an environmental nonprofit with the queasy habit of putting its minority members – a handful among tens of thousands – on the cover of their magazine.)

One of the hulking men asked me to sign in. There were only ten or so other names on the sheet. Then someone hoisted a webcam and took my picture. A machine on the desk whirred and spit out a yellow name tag with my real name (ugh – Harold), the Fidelity logo, the date and time, my ugly mug, and a large bar code running under the photo. At least they didn’t engrave it on my forearm. Evidently I was the “guest” of Cindy Collins, a Fidelity official who I’d never met.

I affixed the tag to my shirt and was “escorted” by yet another enormous young man, his bullet head shaved clean, to a security station with several guards and a metal detector. A sign forbade recording devices, audio or video. I emptied my keys, belt, notebook, and bent copy of The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank into a plastic bin, but still set off the alarm passing through the gate. One guard gave me the metal-detecting wand treatment, as if frosting my body head to toe. I pulled out coins and a pen with a metal clip. More of the wand and finally I got through –

Look, I’m no human rights activist; it’s an accident I was there at all, motivated by curiosity as much as outrage. But I was starting to get that deep-down, pissed-off feeling, you know, the one that starts in the small of your back and rides up your spine and wraps about your skull. Lighten up, Fidelity. What are you afraid of? A little chat about complicity in mass murder? Heavens, what a gang of radicals, what a scary knot of mostly middle-aged idealists had gathered on your turf!

Fidelity had allocated 30 minutes for the meeting. Two representatives of IAG would get five minutes each. Ten minutes were set aside for the shareholder question-and-answer period, with a maximum of one minute allowed for any one question and its answer. Statements could not precede questions. No deviations from these parameters were allowable. And so on. At a table at the head of the room, draped with a white cloth hiding human parts below the waist, sat five Caucasians: four men and a woman. She didn’t speak and neither did one of the men. There were no Jews at that table. Jews are so sensitive about genocides and stuff.

The meeting was run by John Hebble, a Fidelity executive with a boyish face. To his right sat the lone trustee in attendance, Kenneth Wolfe, and the chair to his left was inhabited by an erect lawyer named Scott Goebel, the Chief Legal Officer of Fidelity Funds. He was 41 years old; there was something far older about him, though, something chilling, and I’m not referring to his name, its closeness to the name of the Nazi propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels. It was his voice more than anything else, smooth and cold like tempered steel, and his eyes stared with vacant intensity.

Goebel read a canned statement about Fidelity’s strong disapproval of genocide, then another statement declaring the “complex” nature of the issue: “Though we do not like to admit it, as investment advisors it is very difficult for us to evaluate cause-and-effect relationships in a social and political situation as sensitive as this.” He summed up matters this way: “If adopted, this proposal would limit investments by the Fund that would be lawful under the laws of the United States. For this reason, the Board of Trustees recommends that you vote against this proposal.” In the proxy book, a similar sentence put in capitals the word AGAINST.

Then two representatives of IAG made eloquent appeals. Eric Cohen stated logical arguments and statistics, including a 2007 study by KRC Research in which 71% of respondents said companies should take extreme cases of human rights abuse into account when making investment decisions, and 77% said they would switch their money out of a company that invested in firms with strong connections to the Sudan. After him, a woman talked about the perils of standing aside, of looking away as something awful occurred. As she spoke, four of Fidelity’s people at the table blushed. The voiceless woman blushed deeply to her neckline. The voiceless man squirmed and kept taking sips from a bottle of water. These facial betrayals erupted most strongly when the speaker quoted Holocaust survivor and writer Elie Wiesel: “Indifference to evil is evil.”

You can imagine how it went. Activists asked questions, some calmly and some with irritation. Don’t you care what your shareholders think? How can you not do something? Why is the board recommending against this proposal – why not remain neutral? A black woman who had traveled to Darfur asked if the board really understand the human suffering of the genocide there. At least three times, Goebel answered with a variant of the passive rejoinder, “That question has been answered.” When a young woman accused him of stonewalling, he denied it. His face remained pale, a mask.

At other meetings I’ve attended, questioners approach microphones set up on stands, but not at this one. At the Fidelity shareholder meeting of July 15, 2009, a security guard held a wireless microphone up to questioners’ mouths and removed it at a signal from the company lawyer. It was, once more, a peculiar and unnecessary restriction. The authoritarian impulse is difficult to resist.

I asked the last question of the day. My plan was to start by reading a passage from Diary of a Young Girl written on July 15, 1944 – exactly 75 years ago, this day. Anne Frank tells us: “I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can hear the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.” Three weeks after that entry, the Gestapo apprehended Anne and her family. Eight months later, Anne died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

I had wanted to read this passage to shame Fidelity with Anne Frank’s struggle to maintain hope in doomed circumstances. I had wanted to contrast her beautiful, naive faith in humanity with Fidelity’s ugly rationalizations. Alas, statements prior to questions were verboten. The security guard stretched the microphone to my lips and I addressed the trustee at the table, Kenneth Wolfe, who used to run Hershey Foods before joining Fidelity’s board. Please describe the board’s discussion of the genocide proposal. What arguments were made and how long did the debate take? He sat up, speaking for the first time, and said that they took the issue very seriously, very seriously indeed. There was much discussion on all sides of the matter, he stated, and as for the vote, it was “unanimous, I think.” Then Goebel closed the Q&A period down.

Wolfe seemed a grandfatherly sort. I wish I could have taken him aside and talked with him about American GIs who gave Hershey chocolate bars to kids they encountered in the death camps. Some of the children nibbled carefully, joyfully, and some wolfed down entire bars and their intestines burst and they died. I wanted to commiserate with Mr. Wolfe, about how the world could be turned that stupidly upside down. And then I wanted to ask the sleepy old trustee: after your serious discussions at the board level of Fidelity Investments, talks which you engaged in with maximum focus, do you know who’s killing who in Darfur? Is it Arabs killing blacks or blacks killing Arabs? Or black Arabs killing other black Arabs? Who’s killing who?

Take your time, Mr. Wolfe, and don’t worry if you muff it. I get confused myself and my students are clueless – young people who are supposed to be idealistic fools. Blacks, Arabs, everyone’s killing someone, right?

Didactic theatrics are not me, however, at least not in the realm of real life. Elahna, for one, feels it’s hopeless to try to change organizations from within and it doesn’t matter if you’re talking in civilized tones or yelling like a madman. But, she says, maybe there’s value in speaking up, in ventilating your heart and mind. (Is she trying to make me feel better?) Who knows, she says, maybe a bigwig at the head table will reexamine his position and “talk to someone, even his wife. Just to acknowledge his humanity.”

The meeting closed at 9:18 a.m. Goebel was handed a piece of paper and announced the results of the shareholder vote on proposal #3, as if it were a memo about hygiene. Support for the proposal received between 18% and 25% of votes. So much for genocide in the year 2009 – perhaps “never again” should be amended to “never again, next time” – and the Fidelity officials at the table departed out a side door with the exception of the blushing, voiceless woman, Margaret Carey, another attorney for Fidelity. She made her honorable exit through the crowd and had the pleasure/pain of encountering yours truly.
I asked her who had determined the Q&A restrictions. It was a joint decision of Fidelity officials, she said. Why was everything so controlled, I asked, so condensed? She explained that Mr. Wolfe had another meeting that morning. So why not have a different trustee? No one else was available, she responded, a nervous or perhaps annoyed timber growing in her voice. I thanked her; she flashed a smile. Another bozo handled, maybe she thought. Or, what’s his problem? Or, God help me, more lies curdling from my mouth, does everyone have to do this to get ahead? I hate myself.

The kindly old Wolfe was an obvious choice as Fidelity’s “Darfur trustee.” What if, for instance, they had presented Trustee Arthur E. Johnson who also sits on the boards of energy and aerospace firms such as Lockheed Martin and Eaton Corporation?   According to Eaton’s website, in 2009 they signed partnership deals with AVIC, a Chinese aerospace company, and Russian Helicopters. Each firm has supplied Sudan with military hardware used in their ongoing genocide. That’s the kind of trustee who doesn’t exactly shine at a shareholder meeting about Darfur.

Corporate Boards of Directors and Boards of Trustees are the hidden power structures in America, a kind of magnetic cloud of associations existing above the fray. At board meetings and board-sponsored charitable events, the prevailing agendas and ethics of corporate behavior are reinforced as members forge networks which reward and penalize players according to strict indices of power and wealth and, above all, an unwritten code of mutual support. Unless you’re directly competing with another person for business, don’t tread on their toes. And so it’s no surprise that irresponsibility and immorality are distributed throughout the corporate cloud, just as risk was distributed to the winds in the faux financial products developed by the Wall Street wizards who crashed the world economy in 2008-2009.

Don’t make waves. Don’t oppose genocide if that stance will anger someone who might be in a position to help you, or hurt you, in the future. Such attitudes flourish because of the organization of corporations and their pervasive influence in our society. At the same time, it’s also personal; there’s something wrong in the hearts and minds of many rich people; in fact, so deeply run these disturbances that money-obsession should be included in the next thrilling edition of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

You think I exaggerate? I give for your consideration Fidelity Investment’s 3rd Annual Millionaire Outlook, released in 2009. (Fidelity’s definition of a millionaire does not include money tied up as real estate or in retirement funds, so they talked to real millionaires, the ones lighting cigars with fivers.) The upshot of the Outlook was that nearly half of U.S. millionaires do not feel wealthy – a figure that doubled since the recent economic turmoil. The poor dears! Oh, the worry, the fear, the need to regain lost equity! No one likes to lose ground in any endeavor, but let’s take a cold look at this situation. Being rich but not feeling rich is illogical and delusionary, indicating a near total inability to assess one’s life in the context of most other lives on the planet. So, what do you think – does this pattern of thought constitute a disorder, if not a pathology, that ultimately allows one to ignore genocide in favor of profits?

One final comment, to be fair: in 2007, Fidelity sold much of its holdings in PetroChina, although it kept about $600 million worth of shares on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (PR law #17: do it out of the country) and hundreds of millions in Sinopec, another Chinese firm profiting from the Darfur genocide. Fidelity claimed that these moves had nothing to do with human rights or pressure from interest groups, that it was merely exercising fiduciary responsibility to maximize investment returns, and so forth. Who knows, for sure? Companies, like bullies, rarely admit giving in to the little guy, to the persistent, peeping voice on street corners and at shareholder meetings. My default position is to believe anyone who trumpets their capacity to sin.*

*In subsequent years I zeroed out the 529 college fund that got my daughter through college and switched my retirement money out of Fidelity to the New Alternatives Fund, “a socially responsible mutual fund emphasizing alternative energy and the environment.” Returns are good so far. And mass murder continues apace in the Sudan.

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(page 360) It might, Murray Gell-Mann volunteered, be a good idea to alter human beings with technology, due to our “possibly inherited tendency to trash the environment.” Needless to say, he wasn’t too optimistic about the future. In 2050, he said, “I assume it will all be bad, but you don’t give up.”*

*I also interviewed Gell-Mann’s much younger colleague, the ecologist Jennifer Dunne. She told me that mankind has entered a “freakish period” in which we’re “rapidly disconnecting things that are knit together.” Humans might want to remember, she said, that “the world is a giant complex system and we’ve thrown a lot of insults at it.” And even if we knew how to undo those insults on a global basis, which we generally don’t, “there’s no political system on the planet set up for long-term planning.” It seems we’re in quite a pickle, Dr. Dunne. “We’ve lost our sense of connection to other organisms,” she continued. “The hubris of humans is that we’re separate from everything.” And then she smiled and made a relaxed laugh that put me at ease, as if to say, it’s not your fault. (It is, of course, to a tiny extent.) She was a delightful interview, her desire to learn what makes the world go ‘round transcending her pessimism at every turn. I could imagine Jennifer Dunne taking over the Santa Fe Institute someday, listening kindly to her colleagues’ crazy proposals, forging a web of fortuitous connections and, eventually, morphing into a cantankerous old scientific coot in the tradition of Murray Gell-Mann. Well, maybe not that last part.*

* If Dr. Dunne is right, that we are ruinously unraveling the web of life that’s evolved over millennia, then shouldn’t the public schools be explaining this phenomenon to eager, young minds? Aren’t the interwoven connections between creatures inherently fascinating? Do we really want to remain ignorant and believe that we’re top dogs on this planet who can do whatever we like with no consequences? And isn’t it cool to be NOT SEPARATE from everything else? Tentative answers: 1) I don’t know, it’s ridiculous; maybe K-12 education is now all about job training; my college students, alas, are focused on their careers as freshmen; 2) I think so, but it gets complicated and people like things simple; 3) Yes, we’d like to be heedless top dogs, not smart stewards; 4) Hell, forget about the so-called natural world squirming out there, most folks are separate from one another, and it’s a long, lonely road to the grave.

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(page 373) After all, who am I? Another reporter on another fool errand. A word-scrambler following the story of a year, 2050, that can only be dreamed out of everything before and nothing at all.*

*On the main façade of Antonio Gaudi’s unfinished La Sagradia Familia cathedral in Barcelona, Spain, in the vicinity of multitudinous horn-blowing angels, there’s a maybe 40-foot high sculpture of a woman at a harp. Her hands are ready to play, or perhaps in mid-play, or now that I think about it, maybe they’ve just completed the song. It struck me only later, examining a photograph I had taken of the woman, that her harp had no strings. Harp strings are tough to do in concrete, even for the great Gaudi. And yet on that day I stood staring mouth agape at the world’s most absurd, sublime cathedral, a monument to human ambition and folly, my mind filled them in. I saw strings.*

*Of course, Gaudi could have put some real strings in his sculpted harp, anchored cords of cat-gut or silk into the concrete. Then everyone who cared to look would see strings; no one would have to use their imaginations or engage their default filler-inner devices; all would be provided as per the intentions of the artist – and this reminds me of the trailer I saw for a movie about some international conspiracy regarding Dante’s map of Hell which, it turns out, is really a map or a puzzle or something more sinister and the star, Tom Hanks, talks the plot throughout the trailer, exclaiming what he’s done and will do and why as he runs through the exotic streets of the world. Look, strings. And I’m reminded, too, of the tennis racket I swung a million times as a teenager. It was a wooden Bill Tilden model, its hitting area a mere dime compared to the quarter-sized surfaces of today’s carbon fiber-titanium alloy rackets, and it was fit out with catgut. This bothered me a bit, that a cat died for my pleasure – not that I liked cats and neither did my dog, Pierre, a scruffy black labradoodle – so when my racket needed restringing I asked for nylon. The guy at Herb’s Sport Shop said nylon could be slippery. No matter. Little did I know that catgut was a misnomer; such strings are actually made from sheep intestines. It’s funny, isn’t it, how we exist in a gauzy haze of half-knowing what’s going on, if we’re lucky, and the faux certitude of Google and Siri and Alex (“the brain,” says Amazon, “behind Echo”) ain’t gonna change that soon. I have, btw, an old 16-mm home movie of a Pierre encounter with a hissing, fur-electrified cat that interrupted a neighborhood whiffle ball game in the Farrell’s front yard on Cape Cod. The kid-players, including eleven-year-old me, jump back and gawp at the sudden, primitive animal spasm, and around the combatants we dance and dodge, grainy boys and girls jerking from frame to frame of the degraded film stock, a ghostlike scrum of future lawyers, writers, professors, massage therapists, coffee and bond and insurance salesmen, housewives and fishermen, mothers and fathers. A few have died young. Watching that movie again, I remember not so much particular stories or words spoken but everything we summer children meant to each other, the friendships and resentments and stupid jokes, the secrets hurts and joys, our invisible strings reverberating still.

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(page 382) On a park bench in Bet Shemesh HaElYon, I asked him why Ultra-orthodox men shunned military service and took welfare even when they were capable of working. He replied with a sermon about prayer through study and the evils of masturbation, and then urged Elahna to drop me and find a nice, Jewish boy. I could know her physically, he insisted, but never spiritually.*

*Alas, a small part of me wondered: Is the moron right? Maybe – but why the hell do I have to know her spiritually? That sounds too close for comfort, a violation even. Better I know what makes her happy. Better I learn to say “I’m sorry” and “You’re right” in those times and places that matter. Better I try to accomplish the tough, everyday stuff and leave spiritual bonding to the fanatics setting their crazy rules for the crazy futures they want to club us to death with.*

*True then; still true today; damned if it won’t be true tomorrow.

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Just leave them alone, said Avi, they’re crazy.*

*Avi’s advice is lost on Elahna’s mom, who can’t let stuff go. She’s divorced and feels burned, so it’s understandable. Sure, she took her therapy after the split, but like many psychologists (especially the professors) she’s impervious to that kind of mishigas. The mesh on her psycho-filter is so densely woven, so deeply articulated and adumbrated from a lifetime of study and feverish reading that the banal, true or not, has trouble getting through. Case in point: Hadassah at the Western Wall, in Jerusalem’s Old City. The Israeli government long ago threw up their hands and let the Ultras set the rules there; it’s mostly tourists lining up anyway – Germans and Aussies, teen groups from temples on Long Island, scruffy backpackers who haven’t showered since Amsterdam. Hadassah has an issue, though, G-d bless her, big feminist time. She refuses to get in the separate line for ladies, far off to the right, in the shadow of the aerial walkway to the Dome of the Rock. She pounds her rubber-tipped cane into the ancient, sacred dust. “I helped build this country,” she repeats, again and again – and it’s true, she grew up in a Jerusalem ghetto and watched the War of Independence catch fire and served her years in the Israeli military. “We built this country,” she says, and the frazzled security guard calls his supervisor, who soon calls his. Finally, as a compromise, the Guardians of the Wall allow her to approach it from the far left side, not with the women, and not with the men, but as a loner in a temporary line created just for her. Poor Hadassah. She loves history, personal and global, and that’s her curse. She’s never understood that the past is like a plant’s roots. Unseen, unappreciated, gnarly, clotted with dirt. The present is the stalk and leaves reaching to the everlasting sun. The future? Maybe blooming, maybe not.*

*I’ve always felt bad that several years ago I botched the transplantation of a huge, rambling rose bush from Hadassah’s fence on the western side of her backyard to the fence on the eastern side. This is before she fell again, and again, and we had to move her north to live in a facility nearby us, and then she died. So the western neighbors were replacing the fence and Hadassah worried that her beloved rose bush would be injured in the fuss. I hung a trellis constructed from strips of roofing wood – very rustic, charming – on the eastern fence and got to work. I knew that roses were tricky transplants and made sure to dig far out around the rose bush and to go deep enough to capture a large root ball. I took my time. Or did I? I wasn’t in the best of moods for reasons I can’t recall; it could have been because of Hadassah, an often “difficult” person. Or maybe my back ached. Besides, did I really need to conduct a massive excavation just for a quick rose-dash across the yard? Regardless, I worked hard or maybe not hard enough in the hot, July sun, and maybe I convinced myself that I was doing a good job, bringing enough of the rose’s old world to its new location that it would feel comforted, at home, so to speak, but the rose-roots came loose from their dirt-glue in the wheelbarrow and it was a heck of a time transplanting. I tried to compensate with extra water and rooting powder, and I sped to the garden store and returned with compost and manure that I spread, like butter, all around. Gingerly, I propped thorny branches against the trellis, threading them into grateful spaces, and in the process I was stabbed through Hadassah’s work gloves. This pissed me off; the sun pulsed and my long-sleeve shirt stuck to my back like a rubber wet suit. Then, viola, enough already, done. I put a happy face on the event. Hadassah, who had been watching in her perambulations across the yard, smiled indulgently. Weeks later, she told us on the phone that the rose bush had died. I apologized; she said don’t worry about it, bubala, but her disappointment was clear. Or was I projecting? Last year, at our house, I had the opportunity to transplant another rose bush. It traveled from the front yard, where Hadassah’s daughter didn’t like it, to an open space near the compost bin in the backyard, and never has a bush, rose or hydrangea or juniper, you name it, gone in such grand style, received such tender touches even as it scratched and ripped at its servant. These reproaches, I felt, were deserved. The scratch across the back of my neck seemed a necessary lash. Not until I had preserved a bulbous, back-busting root ball did I transport the rose and slide it into its pre-medicated hole. A trickling hose slaked its thirst, bit by bit by bit for days. Now it’s been over a year and the rose has taken well. It seems to have settled in for the long haul, I hope, and whenever it produces one of its huge, orange blooms I think of Hadassah. I think she’d be proud of my work this time. Ooo-la-la, she might say. Yes, it’s a bit crazy, all this grief for a rose bush, and I know we can’t as individuals or families or communities or nations or a species really make up for past mistakes, but we can try to do better going forward.

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