Elegance Without Lushness

It's easy to be trivial about the desert, ripping across it at a skimming rate in air-conditioned pods. But even from such a patrician perch, the size and scope and hammering heat of it intimidates.

Beside I-10 East, as the Subaru and the Dovekie and I ascended a pass in one of the mountain ranges that lie athwart the Great Southwestern Desert, an old gravel road appeared again and again. I realized that the Interstate engineers had followed one of the old stage and freight passes. On reflection, it was the natural thing to do. The Old Guys tried every pass and settled on the best crossing. I began to feature mule-drawn wagons on that scrolling, wayward track whenever it reappeared, and to notice that it took every possible advantage of topography and natural shape. The Old Guys had shovels and blasting powder and an eye for advantage. Damn, the trip across these mountains was epic, unthinkable in our cushioned lives. The West wasn't "won," it was endured.

But the mountain passes may have been the easy part. How to cross sixty miles of desert between ranges in Sonoran heat? 110°F at the rest stop. so hot that I almost fell back into the car when I opened the door and stepped out.

Wagons moved at the pace of a slow jogger – though I don't know a jogger who could manage a 10 K in heat like this – making twenty or thirty miles on a good day, camping in the cold, starry nights among the inquisitive sidewinders and scorpions. How could you carry enough water for yourself and the mules? Jolting over rocks, avoiding big creosote bushes, finding eroded edges into and out of the waddies, constant focus in brutal sunlight that had to erode focus.

I crossed one waddie named Palen Ditch out on the vast, flat, gravel platter of the Sonoran Desert. Suddenly I was treated to a rainstorm in the bright sunlight. It lasted exactly thirty seconds and didn't darken the road a whit.

I crossed a larger watercourse, the Hassayampa River, but it was not being used at the time for carrying water. Perfectly good river,  broad and deep, but no water. It was flanked by warnings against sudden dust storms that kick up quickly and reduce visibility to zero. I didn't experience one this crossing (yet) but this particular bit of local meteorology must have been plenty interesting from the seat of a freight wagon.

I enjoyed passing Sore Finger Road, plenty of Ditches (I'm not sure that having a ditch named for you is an honor or an official insult), and watching those giant Quixotic desert inhabitants, the high-tension electric towers, march across the planar land.

Desert colors are muted, though there are occasional gray-green bushes and stunted trees and saguaros. Like the old B&W cinema, however, the beauty is often in lighting rather than chroma. From the desert floor, the distant foothills have a horizontal hachure, a delicate texture seen at a low angle that resolves into parallel lines. At a distance, the creosote bushes resolve into a dot-stippling that shade the rugged hills. A joshua tree standing out among chollas and low bushes seems always like an event, and the saguaros, which top forty feet, are remarkable desert statements.

I remember reading a copy of an old letter at Death Valley National Park, commenting that some birds flew across the desert on their way to some bird rendezvous and simply dropped dead out of the sky from the heat. Understandable.

It would be terribly hard, but it would also be a thrilling challenge to ride with a few friends and some friendly mules across one of these desert stretches, to savor just how it felt, to camp out with a fire and a lot of snake repellant (I'm sure I can Google that), and to lie under the stars talking to the Old Guys.

I want to explore the desert at length if I can. It's spare and harsh and mysterious and elegant. Like Marlene Dietrich, but more gravel.

Braxinoso Speaks

Listen to him, as if. The desert requires lean young men who don't sweat much. Himself is an old fat man who sweats buckets at the least exertion. When we arrive in Florida, I'll nip at his heels a bit about losing weight. He needs to move fast with those boyos about.

BON VOYAGE!

An alien place without hearth-gods, the lares fled – or were they imprisoned in the moving pod sitting under my computer studio window? Bare, dusty, tatty, the former den of an untidy bear.

No, I decided where my particular lares reside: in my Weems & Plath Admiral's ships clock, which chimes the half-hour watch bells. Clever lad, I boxed the clock and it rides behind my seat in the car. I can hear it faintly keeping faith with the time and my household gods, which will inhabit the Taj Garage with me and my boyos soon.

Tears, of course, hugging Laura who has been a strong, warm, loving friend. My advocate and spur. A daughter or a sister, but I often sat in the role of child. Of course, tears.

I 580 through Oakland could be Anyplace, USA. That ugly. No concept of architectural dignity, merely commercial ballyhoo wherever possible.

Once on I 5, however, my little cavalcade – Adkins, Subaru and boat trailing behind – rode south through an inimitable place: the vast, fertile plain of the San Joaquin Valley. Dry, dusty, with wind devils and tumbleweeds, but lavishly irrigated to grow marvels – garlic, artichokes, almonds, plums, pistachios, and wine grapes. Distant mountain ranges watercolored in light, cool shades that emphasize the mighty size of the Valley.

The boat trailers well. I'm happy for the money I spent getting new tires and lights and a bearing lube-job for the trailer. Cruise control is ducky on that long, long road, 60 to 64 mph all the way.

A surprisingly political journey through the Valley. An Adkins rule: ken the quality of the signage to judge the message. These were frequent, expensively painted, well-mounted, all-weather signs that blamed the Democrats for curtailing water, jobs, progress and human rights in the Valley.

"No Water = No Jobs"
"Democrats Kill Jobs and Plants"
"Dust Bowl Courtesy of Democratic Administration"
"Get Rid of Barbara Boxer and Get People Back to Work"
"Water Crisis! We All Need Water!"

Apparently some rich planters didn't get their water allotment and they're using their famously discretionary income to shout about it – without a word of argument or logic – to the passing motorist.

Impressive money. More impressive: a simple prestressed concrete overpass bridge patterned with hundreds and hundreds of perfect, tiny swallows' nests, natural architecture gracing industrial architecture.

And at dusk, passing from I-5 on CA 138 in a smaller valley, the purple somber shape of the hills against darkening indigo skies, with tiny red blinking lights of a high tension line defining the desert floor plane.

Even though I started crying, and continued by driving off with my local gas station's pump handle still stuck in my gas tank (a $173 tank of gas, all told), it was a lucky day full of sighs and long looks across.

BRAXINOSO SPEAKS

Himself did well on the trip. Very little narcolepsy, a short nap in the shade of a building, walking around at rest stops. His right leg is cramping and the knee is bothering him but he's remarkably sane for a prime neurotic going through a massive change. He bears watching.

EXTRACTION

I hate moving.

Dr. Ludgero Gomez was a big man. He had been a mountain trooper in the Army and did not look like a man who was often insulted. He was a delightful person with many virtues but what impressed me most about him, and what lodges in my memory, was how much brute force he applied as he bent over me with a pair of pliers in my mouth.

Dr. Gomez was extracting two wisdom teeth. It was not an elegant or subtle operation. It required a basic gripping tool, an artist’s deft experience, and muscle. In simple terms, Ludgero was pulling out a pair of four-rooted bone processes firmly grown into my jawbone. The mandible is a formidable hunk of material. He was muscling against living bone, tightly clinging tissue, and ripping out perfectly fine wiring in the case of multiple nerve fibers connecting teeth that had expected to stay in place and bite things.

It was a struggle. Dr. Gomez and dental science won. The aftermath was grisly, painful, disorienting, bloody and unpleasant for me and everyone around me. The only person who dealt with it well was my mentor, Dr. Matt Finn. I walked unsteadily from the Gomez Dental Office down the Main Street of Wareham, and stepped from Town Dock onto Matt’s Tartan 36 for a sailing cruise out to the Vineyard and Nantucket. Matt handed me a very naval tot of rum. “It’s an old anaesthetic but it still works,” he said. I told him I was already taking some opiate pain killer. “You bet,” he said, “get that rum down, now.”

Logically, we don’t expect to retain our wisdom teeth past a given age. But your jaw doesn’t know that. It needs opiates and rum to realign its reality.

Logically, we don’t expect to live in the same place for the balance of our lives. But your emotions don’t know that. Your indwelling, heedless heart’s logic balks at the insane ripping out of perfectly good wiring and the foolhardy destruction of comfortable navigation ordinals: this is where my jacket hangs, here is my spoon, there is my favorite chair, I look out this window to Mt. Burdell’s golden slope. all is well.

You only think you’re a logical being. In your picayune life you make decisions based on what you want to happen, on self-interest, on ethical principles, on goals. Yet in retrospect your life is most likely a surprising series of mistaken premises that you can now see were often self-destructive. “Why did I sign up for that?” or “What was I doing with that dame?” Your emotional life isn’t practically accessible but hidden behind camouflage all of us are childishly willing to accept.

“Yes, but I’m older and wiser, now. I’ve got my ducks in a row and I’m on top of the game.” Good luck with that. Your ducks are sniggering at you, and you’re once again convincing yourself that will and sense will overawe deep needs. We do our best, which is all we can do, but the real truth is that we aren’t completely in control of that world of feelings and hurt and wishes beneath the concrete pavement of our street life. What changed the twentieth century as much as electricity was the revelation that the unconscious – the hidden awareness beneath conscious thought – not only exists but exerts more powerful leverage than daily decisions.

I’m reminded of marine architects designing sea vessels, strong and powerful, proof against anything. Once offshore, logical engineering and strength of materials are subjected to primally limitless forces, stresses and loads no one can foresee. In the early 60’s a Royal Navy cruiser more than 600 feet on deck plunged into one of the freak troughs the Agulhaus Current produces and went down. To the bottom. All hands lost. The ship was a marvel of modern engineering and enlightened understanding. To the bottom. Is your life as well engineered as a Royal Navy cruiser? Perhaps yours is; mine isn’t. Facing the brute forces of Life, I can expect to be battered even when my ducks seem lined up in Prussian precision.

My point is that moving is emotionally dangerous and shouldn’t be lightly regarded by you or by your friends. “You’re going to love the new place!” one says, certain that your discomfort is mostly indulgence in illogical thinking. Heartily patronizing, friends tell you that moving is healthy and you shouldn’t sweat it. Why worry about it? Look on the bright side! You’re getting yourself in a lather over nothing!

Anglo-Saxon epithets don’t have the punch they had before HBO and can’t really address this kind of puffed-up posturing. Thinly disguised behind a friend’s “assurance” is the self- aggrandizing pity: “Poor Adkins. He believes in faeries and UFOs and global warming. Of course a person of such weak mind will crack under the mild stress of simply moving.”

Recollect the lares. For the Romans these were household gods. (The singular is lar.) They differed from the great gods in that their influence was localized, operating only with a given household. Each family home had its own chosen lares. Beyond the home, there were local lares for glens and brooks and waterfalls, shops, bridges, and streets. These were short-range deities but powerful, and they were intensely important to the families or the artisans that acknowledged them. Later lares were the Scottish brownies and the Anglo-Saxon elves, localized spirits caring for homes and inhabitants.

Strange territory for a science reporter but lately I’ve been confronting the idea that principles of the heart and feelings are not incompatible with scientific principles. Do I believe in brownies? I do not. But I believe that they may be a cipher for important emotions and ideas about home and hearth and the holiness of places. Any scientist who has sat in a redwood grove for more than a few minutes will admit to a feeling beyond simple observation.

It’s possible that we disturb the household gods at our peril. They don’t have the power to curse us but they are avatars of ideas important in our human development – this is a significant place, a home, a small place of safety and calm my heart knows well.

I’m moving. I would do so gently and without Ludgero Gomez’s massive strength of demolition. My heart is sore and my emotions are flighty. I am probably the Wimp of the World, and yet I believe that moving one’s heart is perilous and painful.

BRAXINOSO SPEAKS           

You would not credit the mumbling, rapid breathing, lower tract distress and angst Himself has invested in this cross-continental endeavour. Even I, as the voice of reason within the home, caution him to pay attention to these intense feelings and not to throw himself too rashly at the game. Beyond the emotions raised like dust around the moving, both of us look forward to being part of a sweet family with boys and the new little girl. I’ll have new challenges to meet with those little Adkins/Burger larvae. Both of us are excited. Half way across the Great Southwestern Desert, we may begin to rejoice.

The Arrogance of Patronizing Blue Collars

The following is a diatribe directed at John Fahey, the chairman of the board of the National Geographic Society. It's from Society Matters, a blog for which I'm an advisor and occasional contributor; it's a band of ex-NGS employees who are concerned about the editorial direction the magazine has taken, and even more about the dreck presented as factual and educational on the Society's cable channel.

It should be said that Geographic, following the gimlet-eyed greed of its former president, Gilbert Grosvenor (the grandson of the first editor-in-chief, Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor, son of the great e-in-c Melville Bell Grosvenor, but "the blood ran thin") sold 70% of the channel to the King of Sleaze, and the Enemy of Journalism, Rupert Murdoch. Even so, the channel carries the Society's "brand" and is cheapening the venerable image built painstakingly by extraordinary explorers, writers and photographers. My nine years at Geographic were proud times for me. The Society's standards today are much-degraded.

But this isn't merely about Geographic. There is a corporately imposed disconnect between learning, journalism, honesty and the working people of our country. Giving citizens bread and circuses is cynical but understandable. Giving citizens lies and assuming your own citizens are cattle is short-sighted, wrongheaded, and enormously damaging to the fabric of society with a small "s."

I'm a fussy elitist in my own way. But I have enormous respect for the American working citizen. I reject the notion that working people are lazy, prefer welfare, are stupid and dull. No. It simply isn't true. We had, not too long ago, a lively and discerning middle class. With a few notably dented exceptions, everyone I've ever met would prefer doing good work to being given government doles. We're in a crisis when the Geographic Society and the politicians in DC consider the citizenry as a herd of biddable, predictable, mindless sheep.

"The fix is in. Everyone's crooked. You'll do anything for enough money. If you don't do it, someone else will – you might as well get paid for doing it. Miracles don't happen and governments are corrupt; it's always been that way, always will be. Why complain about politics? It's all a show. People are so dumb and lazy that it's worthless to offer them anything of quality. Joe Six-Pack likes it dumb."

This is what Alexander Pope was worried about in his "Essay On Man":

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As to be hated needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.

Our Devolved Geographic Society is operating on the cynical principle that its audience is so imbecilic that it will only favor bright lights, candy and scandal. This debased Society also embraces the fiction that "reality shows" are something the public desired.

First, Joe Six-Pack is a hell of a lot smarter than the TV vice-presidents and the boardroom think. He lives in a complex world of compromised possibilities and is more aware of broader issues than his grandfather or great-grandfather. Joe has been exposed to more cultures and religions and places. He's been relieved of much sentimental surety about faith and politics and permanence. He's seen the world change drastically. He is trying – and this is an ongoing, difficult effort – to retain balance.

Joe didn't want "reality shows." They were a function of the Writer's Strike in the 80's, when it was discovered that a small production company that paid only a few of its subjects could – by being in-your-face provocative – provide passable air-time for less money. The formula was so successful that "reality TV" proliferated.

Given a chance, Joe Six-Pack could make intelligent decisions. Cleverly, his corporate government has narrowed his access to information and overview by actively restricting information, unashamed propaganda, disinformation, and even by flooding the internet with spurious data (we're beginning to learn that much of the right-wing no-climate-change web myth has been generated by oil-paid bloggers).

Not only does Joe's government try to confuse his balance, but a venerable ally of education and exploration – The National Geographic Society – has surrendered its virtue to the myth of Joe's idiocy. A Society that once addressed cutting edge technology and revealed archaeological wonders is serving up junk-food – scripted soap operas insulting their subjects and disregarding facts. These "shows" play to gullibility, lubricity and scorn. They stray as boldly across the lines of good taste as Hiram Bingham strode boldly through Inca jungles.

The central and most damaging principle on which the Devolved Society functions is that it MUST provide such dreck programming. If it doesn't, John and his boardroom cronies suggest, the Society could fail, lose its audience, disappear, go the way of the dodo.

Very well, then. The National Geographic Society has had a good run, has done great work, and perhaps it should close its doors before it disgraces itself so grievously that its stellar reputation is tarnished beyond retrieval.

Sell, off, John: the buildings and equipment – location, location, location – are worth a mint! Give up! Conclude finally that Joe Six-Pack doesn't deserve good journalism or honest facts, tidy up your desk, and everyone goes home with a nice bonus.

The alternative is more difficult. It will require a trip back into the Age of Reason to fetch the notion that Man Is Perfectable, that given tools of truth and skill Joe Six-Pack could see the world more clearly. It would require effort on an Herculean scale, John, and a few – ahem – shifts in policy. It might even require the dreadful admission that "after some thought and soul-searching, we've decided to re-direct our editorial navigation and get closer to the spirit of the Society's founders and the giants who made it great."

You could be one of those giants, John. Honestly. It wouldn't be easy! My God, the flak you'd take, and you might lose some advertisement, too. You could lose a lot. But you might regain the soul of the Society.

Relying on a perceived stupidity should be more dangerous than it is. The only explanation for getting away with it is that elections and Congressional decisions are so predictably in favor of corporations over citizens, that to recognize the corruption would mean the whole damn system is broken. If it is, we'd all be obliged to go through a vast social upheaval to build a new system. This loss of surety, comfort, predictability and the specter of real discomfort is – even to the intelligent working people I trust – unthinkable. We're stuck for a time in a denial mode: "No, it's the pendulum swinging. We're a democracy. We just gotta get to the polls and vote in the right folks."

That time is past. The big corporations control both parties. The parties determine who will run. We're given a choice between senatorial and presidential candidates who are all approved by big business. Choose one party or the other and we're still powerless.

What's the answer? Unthinkable.

Braxinoso Speaks:

Himself is about to make an enormous shift from California to Florida. Out of the frying pan, so to speak. He plagues himself with these ponderous problems of state, injustice, human rights, heritage, revolution. Honestly, I wonder if he is merely avoiding practical focus on the problems HE has. He makes sense but he has no real forum, no following, and before he leads a charge he must feed his horse. It's my task to persuade himself to be prudent of his time.

July 4, 2013

Both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died within hours of each other on the Fourth of July, 1826, fifty years after the Declaration of Independence was signed. They were friends and opponents, each deeply respectful of the other's intelligence and humanity and even of their opposing views. Jefferson died around one in the morning. Adams died around four, before sunrise, with the words, "Independence forever," and "Jefferson survives." He was wrong. Twice.

Both Jefferson and Adams regarded the growing power of political parties with suspicion but for different reasons. They argued bitterly about this trend. Both saw the possibility of abuse if overwhelming power were to be invested in blocs of influence. Neither imagined the disaster of two massive parties controlling the political dialogue of their nation. Neither conceived that the death of their hopeful and logical social experiment in democracy might be a logical step away from two-party control: the ultimate oligarchy of both parties quietly controlled by the same billionaires and global corporate "entities."

How refreshing it would be if our billionaires were progressive humanists. Alas. The global megacorporations that fund both parties are massive and massively powerful clay "men" without souls or ethics or – most dangerously – nationality.

This Fourth of July, 2013, may be significant to future historians as the end of Jefferson's and Adam's ideals for a nation. We are governed by a legislature and presidency and court that makes extravagant claims of democracy, diversity and morality, but the difference between this administration and the last is disappointingly monotonous. Better diction, same results: a seamless erosion of basic legal rights, privacy, dignity and volition.

A recent article in The New York Times reveals a shadow government controlling the daylight laws by which most of us live. Suddenly and without our consent there are secret courts trumping the rights we assumed were absolute.

It seems to work in an Animal Farm way: there are laws for sheep (that's us), and secret, overriding laws for pigs (that's the unrestricted Gestapo of Homeland Security and the NSA). Most of the time we have the right to a trial by jury, the right to counsel and legal procedure, the rights against self-incrimination, &c. Most of the time, in sheep matters. But when a matter interests pigs, we have no rights. By pig-law, under Homeland Security legislation, we can be arrested, imprisoned, tortured, even executed without counsel or formal charges IF the pigs declare us a threat. What are their criteria for threat? Dunno, it's a pig secret.

In the article you'll find that there are eleven judges on the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court, ten appointed (not elected) by the conservative right of the two-party-same-funders power bloc. One judge reviews and signs off on about 1800 requests for data gathering (what we might in days of yore call "search and seizure") each year. To date, we're told, not one has been refused. Little wonder: this comprises about 5 legal documents a day, a heavy "case load." No refusals.

The pigs have law, power and surveillance completely controlled. The sheep have a desperate need to believe their pastures are the greenest, sweetest, most moral farm in the world. If they didn't believe that, they'd be obliged to protest against a monolithic power structure, they'd be upset and nervous and sad, and many of them would be disappeared. Pigs and sheep thus achieve a balanced harmony. Jefferson and Adams would both be in the custody of Homeland Security, somewhere, and proud of it.

Braxinoso Speaks

Himself talks about the NSA's surveillance lightly, as if he isn't subject to it. Their algorithms connecting firebrand words and patterns have almost certainly earned him at least a file among other dissidents. What the NSA can't plumb is that my inkfish master is about as dangerous as a grumpy groundhog. Still, we hope for literate and pleasant cellmates in the FEMA camp, the NSA lockup, or Guantanamo. There's also the possibility that he only hopes to have a file. A case of wishful paranoia.

ADDICTION AND BOSTON

THE GREAT ADDICTION isn't drugs, alcohol, sex, religion or even money. The most abused addiction is Drama. Every parent of a teenager, especially in the new era of entitled children and laissez fair parenting, should recognize this. Give any kid the tiniest opening for High Drama and he/she will make the most of it.

There's a counter-intuitive factor, here: Drama is desirable whether it's positive or negative. Over and over we watch our children and our grandchildren "stir the pot" to their own disadvantage; they seize an opportunity for spinning up the drama even when they know they'll lose privileges, make us angry, alienate themselves from friends. Drama – high-contrast life, crisis, anxiety, wailing, pain – is more seductive than quiet approval. "Please, God, rescue me from normal!" In many, many young people drugs and alcohol are merely symptoms of drama addiction.

Of course kids live in a world of exaggerated drama. They take their cues from frantically dramatic music and, I'm ashamed to say, from current journalism.

I still consider myself a journalist, and I still regard journalism as one of the noblest professions. But I was embarrassed for my profession as I watched the "coverage" of the Boston bomb incident (note the exclusion of the word "massacre" or "terrorist" or "attack"). Even sober veterans like Wolf Blitzer were scratching and begging for sensationalist, flammable material, the ghosts of maybe-truths, "opinion" and speculation, snap-crackle-and-pop to fill the space between commercials.

The public and official reaction was hyperbolic. Tanks in the streets of Boston (okay, APCs), "lockdowns," and de facto martial law out of 1984. The jumped-up "security" did NOT help capture the culprits; brother 1 was mortally wounded during a sudden firefight; brother 2 was noticed by an emerging citizen after the lockdown, and might have been noticed far earlier on streets with pedestrians and normal traffic. The fact is that the officials wanted to stir the drama pot, as well, to look authoritative and feel powerful, to trot out their black vests and crisis faces, "Back into your homes! This is the police!" Cops want drama, too, and only serious training can convince a law officer not to overreact to every situation. No one in charge of the Boston Incident counseled against overreaction. Everyone had a fine old melodrama.

More fact: We've dramatized ourselves into more domestic terrorism. Copycat, homegrown, wannabe jihadists will now come out of the woodwork to embrace the fame and esteem (remember, "good" drama and "bad" drama are equally appealing) the Chechyan Brothers got, and will hope that an afternoon's work will bring them into a blaze of attention. Forget self-interest, fear of death, and common law. Leaping onto the world stage is an emotional lightning storm, not a discussion group.

The only hope we have to avoid constant domestic strikes is to drain the drama from our electrified anchor-people, to promote sober and factual reporting of facts, filter out speculation and rumor, to minimize sensationalism and sentimentalism in sidebar interviews and features, and to portray "terrorists" as largely half-baked neurotics rather than blazing dragons of evil. Leave "evil" to sermons. Killers are garden-variety whackadoodles and don't deserve vast terms. Call a sicko a sicko, not a glittering demon.

We don't need the might and glory and authority of a super-power nation to suppress violence. This will only yield a police state (Boston during the lockdown) and more drama, more reasons to rebel against The Man. Who will come forth, please, as a sober, calm Grampa Walton to settle our fears and refocus our panic toward getting back to our work? We need maturity much more than Sensational New Developments After the Commercial!

Braxinoso Speaks:

Himself is making sense. We lived on those Boston streets and know those people. The brothers who planted crude bombs, in a pitiful attempt at glory, and the overlarge "crisis team" of officials took Boston for a softer, more sheeplike city. Traditionally (and that's Boston all over) that city doesn't take kindly to royal OR federal mandates and martial control. One Revolution started there. Another is due.

SITTING PRETTY

MY FATHER AND MY UNCLES had many tales about the Great Depression. They remember being lucky because their father ran a business people needed as long as rain fell – roofing. Even so, the Depression was a threat to everyone. Grampa’s family brought in the outliers – Great-grandma Baltz, Great-uncle Valden and a few others that fit under the wing. They scraped and scrimped but were better off than most. Nevertheless it left an indelible mark on the Adkins Boys.

A lot of their tales were happy – odd ways of making a dollar, “making do” creatively, losing a dime through a crack in the stairs and hunting all afternoon for it. Scrimping folks stayed at home, so the Boys remembered a lot of family times, laughter around the card table, working on some new invention made of scrap from the shop.

Some were not so funny. It seems that there was a stratum of the white-collar unemployed who couldn’t admit, even to their family, that they’d lost their jobs as managers, clerks, bookkeepers. The Boys told about men who dressed in suits and ties every morning, kissed their wives and children, and went off to “work,” even though they were no longer employed. They spent their days trying to find menial jobs, selling what personal possessions they could, peddling fruit and vegetables from a basket (an odd apparition, the suit-and-tie potato peddler) and, yes, begging. They were proud men who stayed away from soup kitchens and from social workers. They weren’t part of anyone’s statistics, off the books. Some couldn’t bear the shame and dropped from one of Wheeling’s bridges into the Ohio River. Only then would their family and friends learn they hadn’t been at the plant or the office for months.

We’re careful to call our own financial storm a “recession,” as if this word will make it less toxic than That Other Word.

A friend recently described one of her colleagues to me, a figure from the boom 70’s, a high-rolling consultant to major corporations. I’ll call him Calvin. She’d had several lunches with him over the past few weeks and he seemed chipper, snappy in a cashmere sport jacket, tie, fresh shirt. Business as usual.

But she tripped over an open seam in Calvin’s narrative and plucked at the edges until a new truth emerged. Calvin no longer has clients. Or a home or a bank account or a source of income. He lives out of his car, a small import. The driver’s seat reclines. This is his bed.

How did this happen, she asked.

“I’ve been sick. I got sick and my health has just never gotten back to where it was,” he said.

Calvin doesn’t look sickly. Indeed, he’s gained a little weight. He’s managed to establish a blog, working from library computers, and it rates food at various shelters as if he’s filing for Saveur, but charity cuisine is heavy on starches.

He’s proud of his very toney address, a short block in an extremely wealthy neighborhood near the Presidio. This is where he parks his car at night, reclines his seat, and lays him to his rest.

What’s even more surprising about his address is that there are four other car-dwellers who “inhabit” the block. The residents must realize there are mobile squatters among them, something they didn’t expect as owners of select San Francisco property. They must see the same cars each morning with their windows opaque with vapor. It’s likely that, seeing them every morning, they recognize the drivers/livers. It’s doubtful if the car dwellers and home owners speak as neighbors. Well-off owners may not know quite what to say or what the Law might stipulate for pavement dwellers. The mobile homeless avoid calling attention to their situation. They don’t want to back the brick-and-mortar residents on “their” block into calling the police. If it remains unspoken it w-rung position.

Calvin has neighborhood pride in his “home” address. It’s a safe neighborhood, handsomely landscaped lawns, very low crime. He feels secure there. His sense of place is important. Some of the property owners are probably more ambivalent about the block than he is. He shakes his head about less desirable neighborhoods. Hundreds of inhabited cars park street on warehouse streets near the Bayside docks, close to the ballpark. Rough neighborhoods. “Those guys get rousted, robbed, beaten. That’s what you get with easy parking. Those guys don’t want to risk finding a good neighborhood.”

He gives himself some credit, here, and a ghost of the old consultant’s confidence returns: he’s feathered his nest cleverly, found safety in boldness and decision, he’s sitting pretty.

My friend is among the most generous souls I know. Immediately she offers help: he can sleep at her house until things get better.

No, he thanks her, he’s already been offered similar shelter – rooms in other friends’ homes. Calvin insists that his new life is brave, refreshing. It’s free and open-ended. Then he continues in a less adventuresome tone, “It’s better in my car. If I had a real room I’d get a computer and I’d be on the Web more than I am, maybe all night. No, this way I’m out in the world among real people, doing real stuff.”

What does Calvin do during business hours? He spends a lot of time at library computers blogging about his brave new life. He also does research – web-topics like current business theories, New Age beliefs, and of course his health.

Calvin may be too old to retread with an entirely new trade. Perhaps he could manage as a retail clerk or a waiter but the competition for these jobs is brisk; they usually go to young people. Age discrimination is illegal but very real in hiring practice. He manages to get a few hours of spot work now and then but he wants to keep his “research time” free, his self-imposed computer vigil on the Trends: vast and mysterious political cabals and conspiracies, miracle cures forgotten by Western Medicine, and the unsubstantiated digital folk tales that grow like hothouse flower in cyberspace. He’s looking for a wormhole, a backdoor to employment in a New Age, honorable profession. It’s a slim hope but he’s probably correct in assuming that only an extraordinary path, a chance encounter or a message on the jungle drums, will set him up again.

My friend begins to perceive the tics and tells of serious mental problems in Calvin’s affect. Your health, she asks, are you seeing a doctor?

“No, no, no,” he rejects this notion hastily, “They don’t really know what’s wrong with me. I’m researching it on the Web. I’m taking care of it, myself.”

She has a sense that she’s talking to a man about to step into an open manhole.
She throws another line of help toward him: There must be social services that could help you, places you could go, have you applied for any help at all?

“Oh, yes,” he’s casual about this, “I had a case-worker.” Obviously the social worker is no longer in his orbit. He’s not resentful about the case-worker though he may be as ill-disposed toward her bureaucratic methods as he is toward Western Medicine. When he first approached the social service system’s formidable stone face he filled out dozens of forms listing homely data, personal facts, exhaustive description of his penury.

Quantifying this data upset Calvin, who feels his is a regular fellah weathering a few hard knocks. Filling out even more forms, waiting for the vast system to creak into movement in his behalf, he began to wonder if he needed help after all.

This is the pride of the suit. He isn’t a single mother with many children. He’s not in a wheelchair, not desperately sick. He’s sitting pretty. Declaring himself a social incompetent rankles him. The machine of State won’t, can’t help him. Why? Why must he supply the evidence of his failure, or document catastrophic poverty? He’s disinclined to hound case workers, bureaucrats, clerks and supervisors to receive the dole. He’s educated, worldly, and he has no focus to spare on the byzantine welfare process. He won’t, can’t let the state help him for reasons that probably aren’t clear to him.

Calvin was once a recognized figure in the hard-waxed halls of commerce and finance but as of this moment he registers on no one’s radar. He’s not a statistic because he no longer has a file. The State doesn’t know him. He no longer exists except as a name on a car registration and a driver’s license, uncorrelated with employment records. He’s not part of a “recession” because he doesn’t officially exist.

Those of us still clinging to our conventional stations assume that anyone in a suit and tie, clean and smart, must be normal. This is our delusion. The reality is that this current version of the Great Depression targets the mid-ranks of management especially – those below the decision-making ranks and above essential blue collar workers. Consultants, those “what if” speculators of theory and betterment, are always dispensable. For white collar employees this “recession” may be more dangerous than the Great Depression.

Trade and government have quietly defanged the unions over the past few decades. Workers can count on little help from organized labor which, at its own decision-making levels, has become indistinguishable from Wall Street speculators. The old bare-knuckle union bosses have given way to MBAs who share the same club locker rooms with corporate management.

The glue of job security, that momentum of employee loyalty that created a shared business voice, has been worn away. Most employees have become accustomed to three or five year commitments, and to skipping from one job to another in search of the Big Break. It was once a common belief that a man had two marriages: one to his wife, another to his job. The glue has gone out of both unions.

Calvin’s car is his home in a bleakly modern sense. He has no home. He has an ex-wife, ex-kids, ex-parents, and an ex-hometown. The shit has demonstrably hit the fan but for this respectable man in his jacket and tie there’s no going back to Smallville. In “The Hired Man” Robert Frost said, “Home is where they have to let you in.” But he doesn’t have a reconciliation to make, he can’t return as a prodigal son, no amount of mea culpa will convince his ex-wife’s new husband to take him in. Home is no longer a continuum. Calvin has no hearth or doorstep to which he can return. Returning Odysseus will find that Penelope married one, then several of the suitors, and that Ithaka has been leased by Club Med.

The factor that amplifies employer/employee alienation is the business school abstraction, “hours is hours.” Belief in the wunderkind, the prodigy, the extraordinary employee has faded. Ten hours from employee 415242A is the same as ten hours from employee 655773H; they’re interchangeable elements, no better or worse. Both are regarded with equal suspicion and reduced to corporate-friendly statistics by that corporate food-blender, Human Resources.

When the Great Depression clamped down on my grandfather’s family he dipped deeply into his savings. Most middle class Americans maintain credit card, mortgage and car loan debt that, even in adjusted earlier dollars, would have appalled our grandparents. Yet the index of normality moves with us, our own horizon of what’s real. Service-level banking has encouraged and, in a few subtle but powerful ways, enforced debt as a normal and even desirable situation. We’re told by bankers and we’re reminded by credit reporting databases that unless we borrow, we won’t be able to borrow. This only appears to be circular logic; the financial reality is that year-corrected wages are lower, buying power is reduced, prices for homes and transportation have ballooned, and borrowing is often unavoidable.

The indispensible membership card to our society is the car. Unless you live in one of the few cities with a good subway or light-rail system you need a car to shop, work, take kids to school, everything. There was a brief flurry of outrage in the 70’s and 80’s about superstores and malls draining business from Main Street, leaving town and city centers shuttered, derelict. The more lasting consequence is that downtown neighborhoods are no longer functional living places but bedroom bases from which services are available only by car.

Our “recession” stuns middle class citizens at their most vulnerable: they owe more than they can make, their deepest investments are worth less than the paper on them, they have a long way to fall and bankruptcy is only a stopgap solution.

My friend is concerned that the “health” Calvin worries over is a cipher for mental derangement. She believes he may be clinically disturbed. He is.

Is his psychiatric imbalance organic? Perhaps not. It’s possible that he’s been unbalanced by cognitive dissonance – the difference between what we’ve learned and what we see.

For more than forty years Calvin was inculcated with society’s virtues. One of the central articles of faith has always been the rewards of labor: work hard, stay honest, play nice and you’ll make your way in the world. With luck, you’ll prosper, but even if the breaks go against you, work is your salvation. This is the unquestioned dogma of the middle class and the central component of the “American Dream.” Our economic bad times have confuted all our inherited assumptions. Calvin may have been forced into a psychotic break by clinging to social faith when economic reality began to diverge more and more..

The upward migration of wealth and the weakened financial situation of most workers have made the old assumptions inoperative. Yet the Salvation of Work and the Cult of Progress may be an essential, indispensable part of our American vision, a central article of belief, our worldview. Accepting new realities too readily may be mentally dangerous, a contradiction of basic verities that are part of us.

Work is not a hotshot salvation today. A very few bad breaks can put a comfortable consultant with a cashmere coat and nice habits on the street in a few months. It’s not just Calvin who’s been shaken by cognitive dissonance. We’re seeing that our conception of society, most of what we were taught about America the Beautiful, is no longer operative. Most of us are shaken. Is it possible that a significant percentage of the population is experiencing a kind of mass psychotic break? Has this society become seriously dysfunctional?

We can hazard the question, how far are we from this kind of break? We’ve watched years of ideologue economics bring our culture to the brink of collapse. We voted for a candidate who promised to turn it all around but we’ve discovered that he’s continuing almost every policy, business as usual. Even though we elect leaders the global corporations hold all the cards and all the legislators. What we believed as basic to our national identity is no longer relevant.

When we were young we were told that any one of us could be President. But you had to be smart and brave and tireless. Today, the bar seems to have been lower than we expected. Would our young selves ever believe a real President could be so embarrassingly inept and crassly ignorant as George W? Would any of us in our middle-school classrooms believe that the Attorney General of the United States of America would redefine torture as a law-enforcement tool? Would we have believed that even an apocalyptic catastrophe like 9/11 would be enough excuse to dispense with rights of privacy, search and seizure, and even the suspension of old black-letter Magna Charta’s assurance, habeus corpus? Weren’t those values of intelligence and fairness and decency the fabric of our country?

Calvin is proud of his new life, his neighborhood, his tiny makeshift mobile home. He feels that he’s sitting pretty, ignoring consumer hype, perhaps even making society work for him, for a change. He’s also a danger to himself. The cold wind of Reality will, more than likely, blow through the cracks of his cashmere armor and, sometime soon, confront him with the alternate view of his brave new urban world. Can Calvin survive his adventure? Can we?

BRAXINOSO SPEAKS

Himself has somehow been repoliticized by the Occupy Wall Street Movement. His mother, Dixie, was a crypto-socialist and perhaps even a proto-anarchist who despised the rich as "hypocrits." Who know what we inherit in the hard-wiring? But he's convinced that the entire system is evil and unworkable and, alas, unfixable, since the only workmen available are the Party Pols who feed off the system. I'm not so concerned about the faceless Calvin as I am about his cognitive dissonance and disillusionment with his profession and the economy.