August 30, 2003

Righteousness like a mighty stream

Forty years ago this week, a Southern preacher gave the defining speech of the civil rights era. And forty years ago this week, at the same event, a Southern preacher of a different sort handed out pamphlets telling blacks to get back to Africa, perhaps hoping to provoke a race riot. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech is one one of the truly great speeches of the twentieth century, a masterpiece of oratory, steeped in the language of the church from which King sprang. A hundred years from now, students will still study his words in school, just as a hundred-odd years later, I know the words of the Gettysburg address. George Lincoln Rockwell, the Air Force veteran, Brown alumnus (one of his college girlfriends would later become the only white columnist for Harlem's Amsterdam News), and American Nazi Party founder who led the march forty years ago last week, is a historical footnote. George Lincoln Rockwell gave speeches designed to stir up racial violence and carried placards that replaced King's name with a racial slur. And yet, recalls Taylor Branch, when "George Lincoln Rockwell, the Nazi commander, showed up in Selma and accosted King during a march and said that he was going to prove that King’s philosophy was the work of the devil... King turns to Rockwell and says, 'Well, Mr. Rockwell, I would really like to engage with you and talk about that, and we’re having a mass meeting tonight, and I will give you 15 minutes in my pulpit to discuss that, and now I would like to talk with you about it, either then or afterwards.' And the silence after he said that -- not just by Rockwell but by other people -- was startling silence." King occasionally failed as a politician and as a man, but remained devoted to his philosophy of passive resistance, racial justice, and the betterment of the American soul. He remains by any measure one of the great Americans in the history of our nation. Lincoln said in Gettysburg that "[t]he world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but can never forget what they did here"; the miracle of the March for Jobs and Freedom is that we will remember both.

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August 27, 2003

To the moon, Alice!

Summer is winding down into fall, and soon the harvest moon will be appearing on the horizon. The harvest moon and hunter's moon are the two most stable names that appear on the list of moon names, those fanciful -- "Worm moon"! "Sturgeon moon"! -- descriptions of the calendar that farmers' almanacs love to print. The "blue moon" is missing from this list, as it never defined a specific period on the calendar. Blue moons are the second full moon in a month. The term originally meant an impossibility, Elizabethans not having seen the aftermath of the Krakatoa eruption or other events that introduce huge amounts of particulates into the air. Also missing from the list of moon names is the honeymoon. There are many folk etymologies explaining why a honeymoon is called a honeymoon, but the apparent true origin of the term is rather more cynical than one might have expected from a nice sixteenth-century lexicographer like Richard Huloet:

Honeymoon, a term proverbially applied to such as be new married, which will not fall out at the first, but the one loveth the other at the beginning exceedingly, the likelihood of their exceeding love appearing to assuage, the which time the vulgar people call the honey moon....

Still, the honeymoon today is considered a period of sweetness, not one that presages an inevitable decline; the honeymoon defines a period mapped not among the stars but in one's heart, especially if one's heart is in Niagara Falls.

(more...)

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August 09, 2003

Reader and Other Reader

Already, in the confused improvisation of the first encounter, the possible future of a cohabitation is read. Today each of you is the object of the other's reading, each reads in the other the unwritten story. Tomorrow, Reader and Other Reader, if you are together, if you lie down in the same bed like a settled couple, each will turn on the lamp at the side of the bed and sink into his or her book; two parallel readings will accompany the approach of sleep; first you, then you will turn out the light; returning from separate universes, you will find each other fleetingly in the darkness, where all separations are erased, before divergent dreams draw you again, one to one side, and one to the other. But do not wax ironic on this process of conjugal harmony; what happier image of a couple could you set against it? (Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler)

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August 06, 2003

Battle hymns for Drella

Today, Andy Warhol would have been 75 years old. His work has aged well. By work, I don't mean his art. Most of it is clever and some of it is good, but thirty years of progress have removed any novelty that Warhol's insights once possessed. Warhol made art in the age of television and tabloids, but that's been the state of art for at least as long as I've been alive. By work, I don't even mean his prescient decision to surround himself with a gallery of Greenwich village artists, beautiful people, and weirdos. I don't mean the wonderfully apt idea that we'll all be famous for fifteen minutes, or Interview magazine, or the charming museum he left behind, or his generally interminable films, or the re-introduction of wigs for men. No, I mean the Velvet Underground, and specifically the Velvet Underground's role in the fall of Communism. The VU were responsible for their own genius, of course, but Drella helped make the world safe for democracy when he presented them to a larger world through his movies and Factory gigs. The line about the Velvet Underground, who never broke into the Billboard Top 100, is that they only sold a thousand records but every single person who bought one went out and started a band. Usually people are thinking of the New York club scene of the '70s and explicit followers like Jonathan Richman. But off in Czechoslovakia, a band of hippies called the Plastic People of the Universe (the name taken from a Frank Zappa song) heard the VU and felt the healing power of rock and roll. The Russian invasion of 1968, however, brought with it bureaucrats who rejected the decadent bourgeoise music, driving the Plastic People of the Universe -- and their performances, multimedia extravaganzas inspired by Warhol's Greenwich Village bashes -- underground for a decade. In 1974, hundreds of their fans waiting to hear an illegal performance were herded away and beaten by police. In 1976 they were arrested. On the first day 1977, having attended their trial and been appalled by what he felt it said about Czechoslovokian society, Vaclav Havel and a group of dissident intellectuals formed Charter 77. (The line between Czech artists, intellectuals, and politicians remains blurry today.) Havel spent years in prison for organizing against the Communists; in November of 1989, student protests led to a general strike. Havel's Civic Forum organization demanded the resignation of the Communist government and the release of political prisoners. Amazingly enough, in the face of hundreds of thousands of demonstrating Czechoslovakians (and a Soviet Union not prepared for another Prague Spring), they got it. Vaclav Havel became the first post-Soviet president of the Czech Republic. Andy Warhol's mother, nice Slovak woman that she was, should have been proud. And they called the transition to democracty and freedom the Velvet Revolution.

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August 03, 2003

The opposite of levity

Eugene Podkletnov is a Russian materials scientist who claims to have discovered a gravity shield. An article he published in a peer-reviewed physics journal claimed that items suspended over his device -- a series of rotating superconducting discs -- lost a measurable amount of weight. Serious scientists, people who work for places like NASA and Boeing (which denies everything, a clear sign that something's afoot) investigated his claims. Alas, they were unable to reproduce them. But if you're not convinced that this amazing scientific breakthrough will revolutionize transportation, perhaps even bringing us gravifugal flying crafts, and shape world events (link via The Sound and the Fury ) and if the mention of Nazi superscience and UFOs doesn't make you think of respectable physicists, you may want to reconsider. Overturning physics is serious business, and Roger Babson was a serious man. Trained as an engineer at M.I.T., Babson instead went into finance, and founded (among other things) the National Quotation Board. Babson predicted the stock market crash of 1929 and amassed a fortune, which he sought to use in ways that would better America. A church-going teatotaler, he ran for president on the Prohibitionist Party ticket. He founded Babson College in Massachusetts and Webber College in Florida. And he founded the Gravity Research Foundation. Today, alas, Babson's foundation has been taken over by unserious people, men and women who do not appreciate the threat of "Gravity -- Our Enemy No. 1." The Foundation gives an annual prize; these days it is won by physicists like Stephen Hawking and George Smoot. These are serious physicists, but they do not burn with desire to protect people from the risks of gravity (Babson's obsession was born of personal tragedy; his sister drowned and his son died in a plane crash), much less see humanity reach the stars thanks to gravity shield technology. The only real legacy of Babson's selfless desire to conquer gravity are a few monuments such as Colby University's Anti-Gravity Stone. It reads:

This monument has been
erected by the
Gravity Research Foundation
Roger W. Babson founder

It is to remind students of
the blessings forthcoming
when a semi-insulator is
discovered in order to harness
gravity as a free power
and reduce airplane accidents
1960

The university moved the monument, as drunken Colby students continuously knocked it over. College students are not serious people, but they understand falling down.

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