Living On the Surplus and Study

Part of my study during this practice period and sesshin has been about renewing acquaintance with the people and places that were important during the early period of my introduction to and practice of Zen Buddhism. Not just important to me but important to the Zen movie (as I call it) that was then being made and shown.

This was pre-Counterculture. 1964-1965 ish. Zen came to America earlier of course (c. 1958-59), but it only seemed to be beginning to blossom when I encountered it and got in contact with the Zen Center in San Francisco. I would see it that way because that was when I myself was "beginning to blossom" as a rebellious teenager. Zen practice was part of my rebellion. I think that was true of many Anglo early adopters. Not so much for the Japanese American Zen practitioners at the Sokoji, though. It wasn't rebellion for them. Or was it? 

I have to give great credit to David Chadwick* among others for preserving so much of the Early Days literature, photos, film clips and reminiscences. People who were there then are dying off quickly, probably many more lost than would have been otherwise due to the Covid pandemic. It's a shame, but much has been preserved, and I could spend the rest of my life poring through it. 

It's not just David's stuff, either. The San Francisco Zen Center has preserved extensive archives; Suzuki Roshi's archives at Shunryosuzuki.com is another source. I'm sure there is much more to explore.

*Links to other sites David maintains or recommends are available at the first linked site. 

So much more to explore. And one of the insights I had about it was that all of us -- well, most of us -- were living on the surplus of the post-War (WWII) era. This was one key to the what the Counterculture would become. '64-'65 is pre-Hippie, just barely, but following the assassination of President Kennedy, young people's lives began radicalizing almost immediately. By 1965, many -- particularly on the West Coast -- had effectively separated themselves from whatever had gone before, their parents' lives, the experience and expectations of the post-War suburban life, etc., and were exploring alternatives. 

Zen was (and still is) an alternative.

A certain kind of young Anglo adopted it, tried to adapt to it. Zen wasn't for everyone. It still isn't.

Suzuki Roshi gently tried to guide the newcomers into the practice through his adaptations of Japanese Zen practice as it had been when he was trained (pre-WWII).

I say gently because he was very gentle with his Anglo charges who were attempting to practice a very strict Japanese discipline. 

So gentle that by the time Richard Baker took over after Suzuki Roshi's death in 1971, only the outward, visible forms of Japanese Zen remained; the inner practice had become something else, for different purposes I think.

Because it wasn't what I had been introduced to -- and what I had studied hard to start to master the practice -- I stayed well away from Richard Baker's Zen Center in San Francisco and whatever they were promoting. 

It wasn't "Zen." They called it Zen but it wasn't.

It had become Baker's vision of grandeur. I hate to say it, but that's what I saw. 

But maybe that grandeur was part of Suzuki Roshi's vision as well. Maybe that's what I'm trying to find out with all this study.

It's possibly useful to see the origins of Zen in America as a pre-Counterculture "living on the surplus" alternative -- ie: pointing the way for what was to come.

Sokoji, for example, was housed in a former Jewish temple, Tassajara was a former "carriage trade" resort, the City Center was a former Jewish women's center and residence. All these locations and many more were surplus, they weren't needed by their original users anymore and they could be reused for alternative purposes -- such as Zen. The alternative lifestyles that came out of the Counterculture were almost all based in the fact that there was a big surplus of practically everything needed for living from which to create and sustain alternative (at least for a while.)

Many of the branches that would arise from the SFZC began in well-off people's homes, unused commercial or religious sites, and other private but surplus locations. None have become what primary Zen sites are in Japan. They all still have this temporary, ad hoc, reused location sensibility about them.

Sometimes it's charming. No doubt about that. 

There's also a sense that none of it is really here, either.

Zen is still trying to plant roots in America.

As opposed to, say, Thich Nhat Hanh's Plum Village in France. Which seems to be about as permanent and rooted as something Zen can be outside of Japan (and, well, Vietnam...)

I think my study will continue for as long as I can keep it up, and the two practice periods I've been part of this year have renewed my sense of Zen as it was and as it is now (something else again.)

So many elderly women participants... I've been thinking about that. 

How different that is from times gone by. But then, it's probably natural, too.

Thinking Back, Catching Up

Unheard Dharma talks are piling up, I have one chapter to go in the study text, and I'm scheduled for a practice interview with one of the Zen teachers this afternoon. The truth is, I haven't gotten back into the rhythm and discipline of a Zen practice period of sitting and study and meditation and contemplation and mindful effort. I thought it would come back really quickly after that whirlwind tour of the Other California, the one less seen or known. But no. It hasn't.

Part of what I've seen throughout my return to conscious Zen practice after a period away from it is a tendency of some practitioners to want to be perfect. They desire, nay demand, perfection of themselves certainly and sometimes from others. They seek and see perfection, for example, in their teachers; the elevated illuminated ones, the living bodhisattvas, enrobed and wise.

Well, no. I have a hard time doing that, though I think I am open enough to the idea of what might-could be. I saw for myself how a Dharma talk on the Diamond Sutra by one of the current teachers led me in due time to return to the rhythm and discipline of Zen practice, at least for a while. But when I asked him if would consider taking me on as a student, there was no answer, and I realized soon enough that no answer was an answer and it wasn't "no" nor was it "yes." It was silence to open my own consciousness to the fact that I've had teachers all my life and I still do. What is one more? Or one less? 

Also to open my consciousness to the fact that I am and have been a teacher for a very long time, and I am one now. We study the concept of bodhicitta and bodhisattvas, and we study how they are described in the sutras, and we study exemplars, and we aspire or desire to emulate them. But many of us in the program don't realize how close we may already be, nor necessarily do we see the same qualities in one another. We may see or seek them in our teachers, but in Zen it always circles back to we ourselves.

I think back to one of the earliest teachings I received from Suzuki Roshi when I was a snot-nosed rebellious teenager:

The Buddha is within you, the Dharma is you, the Sangha is with anyone you encounter who is on the Dharma Path.

Buddha-Dharma-Sangha are the Three Jewels of Buddhist practice. We are rarely fully conscious of this fundamental though. We seek the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha outside ourselves, and in truth, it's not there. We won't find it there because it is not there. 

The Dream I had of being in San Francisco after I had experienced The Void during zazen is a case in point. The teacher I told the story to called it a Dream, but that's what "Reality" is in a Buddhist context. Real-Not-Real. The cognitive dissonance of it all. And so forth. And what she saw in my story was basically the Living Truth: the Buddha is within, the Dharma is what is, the Sangha is with whomever, wherever, whenever.

I described how that could be in the past-present-always.

There's a series of podcasts by David Chadwick, an early adopter of the Zen brought by Suzuki Roshi from Japan and popularized by the San Francisco Zen Center at Tassajara and (interestingly) in Los Altos Gatos. Some of what he is describing of the Early Days is not at Sokoji Temple in San Francisco in other words. There was no there there. The there, wherever it was, was at the tips of the branches. At Tassajara, at Los Altos Gatos, Berkeley, Marin, wherever Suzuki Roshi and Richard Baker reached out. 

Chadwick -- DC as he calls himself -- recollects what it was like and some of the people who were there at the Beginning, or Not-Beginning. It was so very different. Well, it was a different world, wasn't it?

I can see why Richard Baker and Suzuki Roshi wanted out of the City, to spread out from the City, to put down permanent roots in the country. The Sokoji city temple was abandoned -- well, they were asked to leave -- shortly after the branches were established. Indeed, before some of them even had the dust covers removed. 

They were asked to leave by the Temple board because they appeared to be uninterested in serving the Japanese American community which provided the space and sought to practice. They were more interested in attracting and serving/being served by Anglos and the nascent (white, very white) counter culture of San Francisco and the Bay Area.

Los Altos Gatos may have come before Tassajara, I'm not sure, probably not, but who knows? Time is not necessarily linear.

Anyway, during that time, I was a kid out in the Central Valley, a lone outpost of Zen in a place that San Franciscans still don't quite acknowledge as "real." They shudder to think. It hurts their delicate sensibilities. The Central Valley is a place to move through quickly if at all. An Empty Quarter. 

It's kind of like where I am now compared to the delicate sensibilities and sophistication of our Santa Fe friends. 

Well, San Francisco, Santa Fe, what's the difference? 

I can't say that Buddhism or Zen has ever been much of a struggle for me. It just seemed natural. Zen postures -- the strictness of them as described by Suzuki Roshi -- were difficult, and I can't do them now due to infirmity -- but... soon enough I learned that you don't have to strictly follow the "rules" and you can still practice zazen.

If you're a monk practicing at a temple then yes, perhaps, but most of us are not and don't aspire to be, so why make ourselves suffer unnecessarily? We have other more important things to do with our practice. Yes?

The core teaching of the Vimalakirti text we're studying is: (in my view) "You're doing it wrong." In other words there is an ease and simplicity to the practice that the rule bound can't grasp. Let go. It's all right. You'll be fine, and you'll find wonderful things.

And this was 2,500 years ago, during the Buddha's lifetime. 

So I'm catching up but slowly. Still a little zzzzzhy from the trip. That's OK. I've seen some of the Dharma talks and they make me laugh. I had one practice interview before I left, and I laughed then too. 

Without laughter, why Zen?

I Lived Here

This is getting bizarre. I wasn't sure about the address. After all, I left this place when I was three or four years old, but some numbers came back to me, and when I plugged them in, up popped this duplex. Sure enough, it's where I lived with my mother and sister in 1951. Not sure when we moved in. Nor am I quite sure when we moved to the other side of the tracks* -- either 1951 or 52. I remember that in 1953 we moved to Los Angeles County. This duplex is in Santa Barbara County.

The exterior is almost exactly as I remember it. The colors are the same. The windows are different, the front doors are solid --they were multi-pane glass when I was a kid -- and the fence and overhead on the left side (the side we lived in) weren't there, but otherwise it's remarkably preserved.

The interior is a different matter. It's been so radically renovated that I barely recognize anything. It almost looks like it's been made into a four-plex rather than the duplex it had been, but I can't tell for sure, and the listing states a duplex with two two bedroom one bath units. The interior photos, however, are very confusing with bathrooms opening off living rooms and kitchens tucked into odd corners, nothing at all like the place I remember fairly well after all these years.

The trouble is there's another house down the street -- two bedroom, one bath single family home that strongly resembles this duplex -- where I think we lived before we moved to this place. Or possibly after. My memory is scrambled when it comes to these houses. I distinctly remember living in a duplex but the picture I have in my mind's eye is not this one -- although we definitely lived here. It's a duplex on another street and my memory of it is quite dreadful. It was tiny, stinky and dark. This one is quite light  especially in the morning for it faces east.

The house down the street is similar, but it is laid out differently. The bedrooms in that house, for example, are on the right side with a bathroom in between. There's a living room, dining room and kitchen on the left side. There's a fireplace in the living room. All of which I remember, and none of which are/were in this duplex. So I don't know what's going on. It's possible that we didn't live in the house down the street, but I stayed there during the day while my mother worked. But maybe not..

I don't know.

This is the house down the street I remember:

There was a big field behind it. Maybe we lived there briefly before moving to the duplex or maybe it was the other way around.

The confusion is part of the reason why I'm working on a mapping project as an artistic way to remember or forget. I've lived in so many places in my life, and honestly, I don't remember half of them, or if I do, it's just snapshots divorced from locations.

We'll see if another one turns up in a real estate listing.

*the tracks mostly aren't there any more, but like most California agricultural towns, the railroad was critically important to moving produce and people and for the development of the town and region.  In this case, the tracks which ran north and south divided the town in two. West of the tracks was Tigertown, very much a working class area of very modest homes and industrial/equipment plants. East of the tracks was something better, whiter, and much more at ease.  When we lived in the duplex above, we lived just west of the tracks -- close enough for me to hear the whistles and the clanging bells in the morning, but not quite close enough to see the engines and cars passing by.

Living in Tigertown didn't bother me, but then I was three, what did I know? Moving across the tracks was more of a culture shock than one might think for a white boy, but there you are. Certain assumptions were made by our new neighbors since we had come from "over there" and given the fact that my mother wasn't married, well, you can just imagine...

Again, though, it's another story for another time.

I Lived Here

This was my father's house in Iowa. It had been his father's, and for years in the 20s, 30s, and 40s it was used as a family "spare" house. Many members of my father's large family lived here for varying lengths of time until the late 40s when my father and his youngest sister movedin permanently.

The small window on the first floor is where the front door to the house and then to the upstairs apartment was. I'm not entirely sure why it was closed off. Now the main entrance to the house is on the side under the porch roof, where the downstairs apartment entrance was back in the day, but it makes getting to the stairs awkward as hell, as they are still where they were when my father lived there.



It was a very old house, or at least parts of it were. It started as a two room single story house perhaps as early as the 1840s. It was gradually added to in the 19th century, gaining a number of wings and a second story. Later, long after my father died and the house was sold in 1969, an extension was added  to the back of the kitchen, and even a two car garage was built beyond that. It appears to be quite a large house now, but I know it is not.

I lived there from the time I was born until my parents' divorce, essentially only 9 months, though I returned to Iowa in 1961 and 62 for a couple of months in the summer each year. The first summer I stayed in the upstairs apartment that had recently been vacated by the death of my father's youngest sister who had lived there for decades. At the time, the house was divided into two apartments. I don't know when that happened, but it had to have been no later than about 1930, as I've found many records showing various members of my father's family living in the separate units upstairs and downstairs.

The second summer, I stayed at a hotel down the street because my father had rented out the upstairs apartment.

The house looks large, but it's not. The rooms are tiny. Unfortunately, the interior pictures in the listing are very poor, and it is difficult to gain any sense of orientation and size of the rooms. When I first saw them, I couldn't figure out where in the house most of the pictures were taken. After studying them a little while, however, some of the pictures of the interior began to make sense.

For example: this is a picture of what had been my sister's downstairs bedroom when I was and infant and was transformed into a cramped living room when I visited as a pre-teen.

The room is about 10' X 11' in size. The three panel window was added by my father to please my mother. It's somewhat similar to the front window of the house where my mother grew up in California. 

The doorway on the right leads to the stair hall, but it was been closed off when the house was split into two. Apparently it was reopened when the house was renovated and turned back into a single family residence several years after my father died.

This picture is of what was the living room when I was an infant and the dining room when I was a pre-teen.

The room is about 10' X 12' or a little smaller. The windows were added by my father to please my mother. The first time she saw this house, she complained that it was dark and musty. There was so little light and air that she said she was depressed and she wouldn't live there. Not only that, the rooms were so small and so badly arranged, it was a nightmare just to get around. For example, the door to the right of the windows leads to a small entrance hall, and the door to the right of that leads to the room that had been a living room or a bedroom. 

This is a similar view taken by my sister shortly before my birth. 

Parental units having a gimlet before dinner? Who knows?

This is a downstairs bedroom. It's about 8' X  10'. It was my parents' room when I was an infant, my father's alone after they divorced. Behind the camera is a bathroom. 

There may be another bedroom beyond the bathroom. I have vague memories of another room there, entered from the kitchen(?) that was used for storage. And then when I went back to the house after my father died, I seem to recall that there was a bed in there together with other bedroom furnishings, and I thought my father had been sleepng in there during his final illness. But my memories of it are not clear.

This may be a picture of that room:

It may also be a room in another house altogether.

This is the west side of the house

The upper window in the projecting bay was originally one of those Gothic windows like you see in the well-known Grant Wood painting of an Iowa couple. 

You wouldn't know it from the outside of the house, of course, and as far as I can tell from the pictures in the listing, you can't see the Gothic arch from the inside of the house anymore either, but when I stayed in the upstairs apartment in the early 60s, indeed, the interior window frame was still in place, and its resemblance to the window in Grant Wood's painting was plain to see. The woman in the painting rather resembles my Aunt Alice too, but that's another story for another time. 

I saw the painting at the Art Institute in Chicago that summer, and I was quite taken with Wood's technique. I remember being surprised at how large the painting was, as I had only seen illustrations in books previously, and I assumed it was fairly small. I mentioned to my father that the window was similar to the one upstairs in his own house, and he said that the house -- or that part of the house -- was probably built at about the same time, which I would much later learn was the 1880s. 

An this is the north side as it is now

The extension on the back of the house is much larger now than it was when my father lived there. The kitchen and a breakfast room area had been added to the first floor of the house -- I'd guess in the 1930s -- but it only extended as far as the double doors onto the deck in the picture above. There were no double doors or deck at that time; there was only a window on that side and a back door at the rear of the house onto a utility porch with steps out to the back yard. 

There's now a double garage beyond the rear extension. There was no garage when my father lived there. He parked on the street. 

The house is listed for sale at a discount price. Not sure why the price is so low except that in this neighborhood, many houses sell for much less. This part of Iowa is not very prosperous, and nearly all the houses on this street -- houses which had once belonged to my grandfather -- are old and dilapidated. This house is actually in better shape than many of the others nearby, but the last time I saw it in person in the early 80s, it was a wreck, painted dark brown and very broody looking. Its current yellow-ness is cheery by comparison.

Again, this is a memory exercise. Finding other houses I've lived in now listed for sale is something of a quest because I've got to remember addresses as well. This one was relatively easy. Others will prove more of a challenge.

I Lived Here

Nearly 60 years ago, I lived in this modest house in a fancy neighborhood in California.

The front and driveway and garage haven't changed a whole lot, though they aren't quite the same. The house is now gray with brick porch and trim; it was white when I lived there, and the brick was painted gray. There were no planters in front, nor were there any round stepping stones.

The house was built in 1939. There were two bedrooms, one bath, an enclosed back porch leading to a knotty-pine paneled family room, a kitchen, laundry room, dining room and living room with fireplace when I lived there. Since the early 1960s, the house has undergone an extensive remodeling. The family room added onto the back of the house in (probably) the early 1950s was demolished and a new much larger addition was built. Two more bedrooms and baths, a kitchenette and a smallish living room were added, pretty clearly intended as another unit. The screened patio attached to the garage was also demolished to make room for the larger addition. The many fruit trees in the back must have been uprooted. I recall apricot, peach, plum, pear, orange and lemon trees.

These pictures are from a recent real estate listing for this house. The front part (the original house) hasn't changed much since I lived there, except for the kitchen and laundry room, and essentially is the same as when it was built in 1939.

The living and dining rooms from the front entrance. The rooms were painted off white, not HGTV gray-green, when we lived there; the fireplace did not have an insert, there were no can lights in the ceiling and there was a rather forlorn crystal chandelier in the dining room. Otherwise, even the furniture arrangement is practically the same as when I lived there. Is this the current owner's furnishings or has the house been staged for sale? I don't know. May be a bit of both.

Another view of the living room showing the little entrance area. The stained glass octagonal window was clear glass, otherwise, the same as when I lived there. We had a pair of wingback chairs by the windows, the usual table and lamp in between. The lower part of the windows had muslin café curtains.

In the dining room as mentioned, there was a crystal chandelier, and the furnishings were arranged pretty much as you see here. Instead of a credenza we had an "Early American" hutch, and the table and chairs were sort of "Shaker" -- very simple (round) table with four ladder-back, rush-seat, chairs. In the living room on the far wall by the entrance was a desk and bookshelf.

The glass door led to what was called "A Room" -- what had been a back porch when the house was built. It had been enclosed some time in the 1950s, and served as a passage to the added on family room beyond. I recall it flooded a couple of times, but I don't remember whether there was a roof leak or water seeped from below. There was a window in "A Room" so there was some natural light in the dining room. What seems to have happened since then is that the addition of two bedrooms and baths plus other rooms to make what appears to be an apartment has cut off any natural light to the dining room.

From this angle, you can see a bit of the kitchen, which I will not detail because it's changed so much, it's almost unrecognizable in current pictures. When I lived in this house, the kitchen was straight out of 1939, very simple and plain. We had a portable dishwasher, though, so there was that.

This was the front bedroom. Although it's set up as an office here, it's not hard to see how it would have been as a bedroom.

A view toward the hallway. Essentially nothing's changed except the paint color. The shelves in the hallway are original.

Except for new fixtures, flooring, and window, the bathroom is pretty much the same. Small, utilitarian, the way they were back then.

The second bedroom. Identical arrangement when I lived there. Another view below:

Could be my room spiffed up somewhat after nearly 60 years.

The rest of the pictures in the listing are of the addition and the remnants of the backyard, so I won't post any. They evoke no memories because when I lived there, the back of the house was completely different.

I like most of what's been done to the place -- except for the addition -- and I wouldn't mind living there again. It evoked other houses where I'd lived, particularly a cozy place from about the same era in West Covina,  and another house in Los Angeles County that had similar qualities though it was built in 1954 (based on plans from the 1930s, I'm sure).

Every now and then, I check to see if former places I've lived are for sale to see if I can snag some images of what they're like now. Houses always evoke strong memories for me, and as my memory deteriorates (another topic for another time) it's more and more important for me to retain as much memory as I can. This particular post is an exercise in memory. Not just of the house but of the neighborhood, my schools, friends, activities and so forth.

I've started working on an art series I call "The Mapping Project" which is a series of graphic interpretations of 20 places I've lived over the years. It's still percolating in my mind, though I've done some preliminary sketches. I hope I can complete it. It will be mostly abstract, but here and there, some elements may be nearly photographic.

We didn't live in this house very long -- 1960-62, perhaps, though we may have moved in late 1961 -- but it made a strong impression on me and there were some... interesting... events associated with it (including a fire, but we'll deal with that another time). The house is listed for sale at a rather breathtaking $589,000 with a pending offer. It's not by any means the most expensive in the neighborhood, but it's up there. Housing price inflation in parts of California is insane.

The Cars

I had a skill when I was very young. I could identify year and make of cars by their badging, shape and trim. It was considered cute that I could do this almost perfectly at the age of three, and it's a skill I've sort of kept over the years. Well, newer cars are difficult for me. They tend to maintain their appearance over several years, and there are a lot of brands now that didn't exist in the '40s and '50s.

I'm trying to keep a list of the cars we had through the years. I've done a post on this topic before, but I'll try to do a list without referring to it.

1. 1942 Packard Clipper. It was Hunter Green, but the paint was very faded. There was a big dent in one rear fender -- did my mother back into something, or did the car get hit by another? I don't know. The interior was ratty. Upholstery worn and torn, stuffing coming out of various places. It had an odd smell, might have been burning oil. My mother got the car in the divorce settlement from my father, and I think she hated it. Finally, the clutch or transmission gave out and she traded it for another car.

2. 1950 Plymouth. This was gray, four door, a Deluxe model. It was a pretty nice car all things considered, but it was a base model, so it had no radio or heater. My mother drove it until 1957 when she was in a wreck coming back from her late call at the hospital where she worked. The car was pretty much totaled. She was injured, broken ribs and wrist, and a nasty knot on her forehead. So she bought a Ford.

3. 1957 Ford Custom 300. This was also a base model, but it seemed to me to be very advanced compared to the Plymouth. Being shiny and new of course was the main thing. But it had fins and chrome and a low and lean look to it, whereas the Plymouth was high and rather staid.

4. 1959 Hillman Minx. An oddball car to be sure. I don't remember why my mother traded the Ford for a foreign car so soon, just over two years, after she bought the Ford. My sister was driving a French Simca at the time, so that may have had something to do with it. Anyway, I thought the Hillman was pretty deluxe, though it was smaller than any car we'd had up to then. It had a radio and heater and green leather upholstery. It was a little difficult to get used to because the shift pattern was different, but otherwise it was quite fine in a British sort of way. It was the first car I drove on my own, badly.

5. 1961 Ford Galaxie.  Well. This one was kind of spectacular. It was black with a red interior. It was a "hardtop convertible" which meant there were no pillars between the front and rear doors. It seemed huge compared to the Hillman, and I think that's why my mother liked it.

Video below of a similar car.

5. 1965 Mustang. She couldn't resist. The minute the Mustang was introduced, she wanted one -- and she got one.This one was green with a black interior. It was pretty basic, but it was sharp looking and she loved it. When the clutch or transmission went out, though, she traded it in.

6. 7. 8. A series of used Thunderbirds. There was a 1959, a 1961, and I think a 1963. My mother bought these cars for herself and didn't keep any of them very long.

9. 1969 Dodge Coronet. This was not a success. Her step-father had worked at a Dodge dealership when she was young, and he had given her her first car, a 1934 Dodge Coupe. She hoped that a new Dodge would be as much of a thrill. It was a disaster. It was too plain after the luxury of the Thunderbirds, and for some reason, it didn't "sound right" and it was hard to drive. Within a month or so she traded it for a...

10. 1969 Pontiac LeMans. She loved this car. She kept it for at least another 10 years, maybe longer. I don't know that she ever bought another car -- but we were estranged toward the end of her life and I have only sketchy knowledge of her after about 1977. She died in 1987.

Because her step-father was a machinist who became the service manager at a car dealership before he went on mercurial adventures as the owner of his own filling station and auto court, eventually losing all his money in a bogus mining venture in Nevada, my mother always had an interest and fascination with cars. My infant skill in identifying makes, models, and years cars from the '40s and '50s was widely admired, but eventually, I didn't really share her auto interest.

I've had many cars on my own over the years, starting with a 1950 Packard convertible (the one pictured below may actually be it):

Imagine a high school kid driving something like that around in 1965. My god. Just looking at the picture gives me a strange sensation, part thrill, part horror.

That was followed by a 1951 Buick Roadmaster, which was followed by a 1958 Cadillac, then a 1967 Ford Fairlane, then a 1970 Chevelle Malibu, then a 1980 Ford Escort, then a 1988 Toyota Corolla, then a 1992 Subaru, then a 1998 Pontiac, then a 1997 Chevrolet Astro van (which I still have) and then a couple of 2008 Subarus purchased in New Mexico, one purchased in 2013 which was wrecked, the other purchased in 2016 which we still have. 

Christmas Comes But Once A Year

For some reason, there are a lot of Christmas pictures among the ones we brought back from California. I guess most families take pictures at Christmas time, but the focus on that particular holiday seems like a function of the era. Christmas was the time to take pictures. It was special. It was only.

There are a number of photos of me posed in front of the Christmas tree taken year by year: 1948, 1949, 1950, 1951 and 1952. This is the first one, and it's probably the only one I will post.

Christmas Kid

There are more pictures of the tree than there are of me so don't get the wrong idea. We would see the same general pictures each Christmas until I was four, then they stop. In fact, there are very few pictures of me taken at any time after the age of four. Don't know why, but that's the way it is.

My mother is holding me up in the picture above. I recall the bracelet she is wearing. It was her mother's, rather baroque, silver and turquoise, but not Native American. It may have been Turkish. Or an American design.  From the 1920s. The turquoise stones were intricately carved, and they may not have been turquoise at all. The bracelet was part of a set that included a necklace and earrings. My mother wore the bracelet frequently, but she rarely wore the other pieces. [I've studied the picture more carefully. It's not a bracelet. It's her watch, a tiny Hamilton on a braided cord wristband. I remember both the bracelet and the watch quite clearly, and in this case confused the two.]

She also liked to wear a ring that had been given to her by her mother shortly before she died in 1941. It was topaz and diamonds mounted in filigree white gold. Topaz was my mother's birthstone. She's wearing the ring in the picture of the two of us after returning home from the hospital after my birth.

The Shiny-Brite ornaments, the tinsel, the carefully wrapped packages stacked all around the bottom of the tree, the tree itself -- always a cut tree, never artificial -- would be repeated over and over again with little or no variation. This one was perhaps the most luxurious tree of the Christmases I have pictures of, but the others come close. It was a ritual, an important one in our household, even when the household broke apart as it would repeatedly.

We have a tree up all the time in New Mexico to honor Ms. Ché's mother -- who loved Christmas more than anything. In front of our all the time Christmas tree is a company of nutcrackers, manifesting our own admiration for Tchaikovsky and the quirky "Nutcracker in the Land of Enchantment" presented annually by the Festival Ballet of Albuquerque.

The tree we have up all the time is artificial of course, but it has a selection of antique Shiny-Brite ornaments (a few saved from childhood, others collected over the years) as well as modern imitations/interpretations, but mostly it's ornamented with New Mexico keepsakes such as St. Francis, cats, road runners, rabbits, prairie dogs, etc.

And no tinsel. Well, we have cats, and cats love Christmas trees, especially hangy things on trees that they can pull off and eat. In the old days, Christmas tinsel was made of thin strips of tin or lead, and of course was poisonous. Now it's made of plastic, Mylar, and is potentially equally deadly. So we don't use it.

Enough of this reminiscing for now.

There are things going on in the wider world that may need some attention.

I understand, for example, that Trump is terrified the Democrats will abolish his Gestapo, ICE. Aww. Poor baby...

Feeding Baby

Feeding Time 1948

Things got better the way they sometimes do. Here I am grinning ear to ear around Christmastime 1948 while my mother tries to find and pick up something I've thrown on the floor.  It was not the first nor will it be the last time I threw something on the floor while sitting in my high chair.

I'm not sure I remember this particular high chair -- although it seems sort of familiar. The one I remember clearly was painted white and had a flower decal on the seat back. This one could be it, if my mother packed it into the trunk of the Packard Clipper with her various house dresses and Cuban heel shoes, and then painted it, but somehow I doubt she did that. More likely she used some of the money she got from my father in the divorce to buy a new high chair along with various other furnishings when we got to California. I know that some of her friends gave her furniture and other household items when we got settled in.

This picture was taken in the kitchen of my father's house in Iowa. I remember that room as being the largest in the house. It was in a one story addition on the back of the house, an addition that was almost as wide as the house and about 12 feet deep, not counting the screen porch.

This is a Google street view picture of the backside of the house taken in 2013. The kitchen is the part with the french doors beyond the triple window.

The room wasn't that wide when I was a tot. Beyond the french door -- which was a window back in the day -- there was a screen porch that was later glassed in and here you see it is completely enclosed.

They cleaned me up after feeding me, and here I sit on my father's lap after a good scrubbing.

Some of the things on the  bookshelf are intriguing. The photo I believe is of my (half) brother Terry whose mother died giving birth to him in the hot summer of 1935. If that's who it is, it is the only picture of him I've ever seen.

There is a laughing Buddha figure on the same shelf and a Chinese enamel vase or perfume bottle. My mother took the Buddha and vase when we left Iowa in 1949 and they were on a different bookshelf in our various houses for many years. I still have the bookshelf, but not that laughing Buddha. I have another, much larger one that sits on a Chinese style knick-knack shelf along with a seated Buddha and various other things of that sort. I also have a similar Chinese vase. These are not things I consciously acquired. They "just happened."

I have some of the books from my father's house, including some that are in the shelf seen above.

And then it was time to take a spin in the runabout stroller.

Let's go strolling 

I remember that particular stroller, and it may have come with us to California on that long drive in the Packard on Route 66 the next year. How much stuff could fit in that car anyway?

Things seemed to be working out, but no.

We'll get to that another time.

-- To be continued

A Child Is Born

So the Blessed Event finally happened. Here I am in my mother's arms -- well on her lap -- the day the two of us came home from the hospital:

Mother and Child

My, my. I don't look happy and neither does she. Well, I don't think she was; as for me? Who knows.

Many years later, my mother told me that when she first saw me, she was shocked. She said I was all red and had some kind of scrofula all over my skin. You can see what looks like a white patch on my forehead. I believe it was an ointment put on at the hospital. There's something called "crib cap" that babies sometimes have, and that may have been what I had.

She also said I cried and cried pretty much all the time. Not the best of debuts, eh?

Though the fancy new windows are open, I've noticed there are no fans blowing through the house on these hot August days and nights. That surprises me. Electric fans were not uncommon in those days, and their absence that summer must have compounded the misery. Years later, my father would install upstairs and  downstairs window air conditioners, but I can't say they cooled the house particularly well in the hot and humid Iowa summer time. He changed out the coal furnace for gas too, but the smell of coal lingered in the house, and some of his things I brought back to California after he died and have here in New Mexico now still smell of that coal furnace all these years later.

Hot and sweaty with a crying, scrofula covered new-born, my mother was not happy those first few months after delivering me. My sister was a teenager in high school at the time, and she would wind up looking after me as often as or more often than my mother did. She was, at least in my view, very good at it, but I would later learn of her resentment. After all, I wasn't her child, and besides, it wasn't fair to make a young girl like her the surrogate mother for... well, me.

So they told me my first few weeks were kind of rough as all sorts of conflicting interests and emotions collided that hot and muggy summer in Iowa. Things would start to settle down some by the fall.

--To be continued

Reminisce

One of the purposes for going to California last month was to clean out stuff we'd had in storage in Sacramento for years and years. We probably got half of the contents removed -- either to the dump or to Goodwill. We brought back a few boxes of keepsakes including several dozen (actually maybe 100) of my family photographs, many of which I thought had been lost years ago.

The last few days I've been going through them, trying to organize them, emailing back and forth with a cousin in California (that I didn't know I had until recently) to try to figure out who some of the people are in early family photos, and trying to remember what was going on in some of the pictures of me taken when I was a few weeks old until I was perhaps five or so.

At first, I didn't recognize or remember many of the pictures, though I had seen them before. As I get older, my memory is getting worse and worse. But also, I haven't seen these pictures in years, some of them I'd only ever briefly glanced at.

So let's get started.

Happy Couple - 1

I call this "The Happy Couple - 1". My mother and father are sitting on a loveseat in my father's house in Iowa shortly before I was born. My mother is not obviously pregnant. There is an orange cat on the coffee table. I used to know the cat's name but I've forgotten. Don't ask me how I knew the cat's name before I was born, but there you go.

My mother seems happy in this picture. My father seems... anxious? I'd guess so. My mother was his third wife. He and his first wife got an annulment after ten years of marriage. Not sure what the deal was -- I didn't even know he'd had three wives until recently -- but it wasn't long afterwards that he married "TED"-- Thelma in 1934. He was wildly in love with her. I have some of his love poems and letters and such that he sent to her. They're very sweet and touching and seem almost like the words of a teenager encountering his First Love. My father was 33 when he and TED were wed.

Well, she died in childbirth in the summer of 1935. I'd known  about the tragic circumstances of her death pretty much all my life, as there was a constantly repeated story, but what I didn't know until recently was exactly when it happened. It was August 12, 1935.

The picture above was taken in 1948, on a hot and muggy August night, just days before I was born. If my father was anxious, I can easily imagine why for my birthdate is nearly the same as the date of TED's death -- a dozen or so years apart.

Some things about the house. It had been in my father's family for many years, and it was already old when my grandfather acquired it around 1900. This room may have been one of the original two rooms of the house and I'm guessing it was originally built in the 1840s or 1850s. It was old, almost a pioneer house in the area.

Over the years, it had been added to in several different directions. Eventually it came to resemble a rather grand Victorian with one of those Gothic arched windows made famous by Grant Wood:

By the time I was born, that window had been partially covered and made rectangular on the outside, but inside on the second floor, it was a near twin to the one in "American Gothic".

While the house appeared to be rather grand on the outside it was actually very small, almost a miniature house. It had been cut into upstairs and downstairs apartments sometime in the 1920s, and over the years, various members of my father's rather large family had taken up temporary residence there. My father inherited the house when his father died (actually, he bought it from his father's estate), and when I was born, the upstairs apartment was occupied by my father's youngest sister Eleanor. She lived there until she died in 1960.

Speaking of windows, the triple window in the upper picture was something my father did for my mother. When she first saw the house, she thought it was dark and dreary. She was from California, and she wanted light and air. She asked my father to put in more windows which he did. The triple window here and another wide triple window in the front room brought more light and air into the house and had a modernizing effect. I understand there had been a wraparound front porch as well, and that was removed at the same time the windows were installed and asbestos siding was put on. My mother was terrified of fire and always referred to this house as a firetrap even with asbestos siding.

The door on the right goes to a small entry hall. On the wall to the right of it (not seen) is a door to the front room which at the time served as my sister's bedroom. Later, it would be turned into the living room, and the pictured room would revert to a dining room which it had sometimes been in the past.

Another view from a different angle:

Happy Couple - 2

From this angle it's possible to get an idea how small this place really is. The room is about 10 feet wide and 12 or 13 feet long. The door on the left is the door to the front room. In the rear is the door to the bedroom. On the left inside the bedroom is a door to the bathroom. In between the desk in the foreground and the chair where my father sits with the orange cat in his lap is a door to the kitchen -- which is nearly blocked by my father's chair-side table.

It was cramped and yet it looks comfortable enough.

My mother told me it wasn't. She hated that house. She hated living there. She hated Iowa.

What she particularly hated was the summer heat and humidity and the god-awful smell of the place. It made her sick.

There was a Purina corn-processing plant in town and that plant stank to high heaven as corn was processed into various products including animal feed. There was no escape from the smell. There was no escape from the heat, no escape from the humidity.

For someone who had lived much of her life in coastal California, it was miserable. Misery was not my mother's favorite state.

Nevertheless she looks happy enough in these pictures taken by my sister a few days before I was born.

-- To be continued

Cowboy: "Punch a hole in the Sky."

Sam Shepard died last week. ALS. I didn't know -- didn't even suspect he was sick. Just old-ish. A bit rough around the edges perhaps from life and drugs and alcohol.

I won't go into a long memorial post about him and his work, some of which had a profound affect on me when time was. He was the only playwright I know of who could accurately capture the spirit and the feeling of life in the hills and valleys east of Los Angeles before the end of the world that it once had been.

Until recently, I didn't know much about his personal life. Didn't care, really. He was a writer, an actor, an artist, and a presence who could -- somehow -- capture the essence of a particular time and place and the people who tried to survive in it, the times and places and people I knew, had lived with, perhaps had been and still was.

When I found out he'd been brought up on an avocado ranch in Duarte, California, in the '40s and '50s, of course it was obvious. This was the why and the how of his ability to capture the essence of what I knew to be true about... that part of the West.

Duarte is less than 10 miles from where I lived from 1954-1959. While Duarte is hard up against the San Gabriel Mountains and I lived on the flatland below, I could see the mountains rising proudly out my living room window, and sometimes I would sit on my back fence and watch them burn as they did practically every year when the weather was hot and the wind was high.

In 1954, the land north of our house, across the concrete drainage ditch that has once been an intermittent stream used by the vanished Gabrielenos Indians, were acres and acres of orange groves protected from the infrequent frosts by strategically placed smoky smudgepots. The avocado trees up in Duarte needed similar protection, though I don't recall Shepard ever writing about it directly.

While I tend to focus on material memories of what it was like back there and then, he was focused on the spirit of the time and place, and its effect. For me, listening, reading, watching and participating in his works when I could -- infrequently, true, but often enough -- was exhilarating and sometimes scary. How did he know?

Unlike many of those posting comments on his NYT obit, I never met him though I was told he came to a rehearsal of "True West" I was working on. For whatever reason, I wasn't there that time.

He was called "Cowboy" -- not that he was a cowboy, just that he knew. We call our next door neighbor "Cowboy," though he's not one, not now anyway, and his name is Kevin. But he reminds me a bit of Shepard, and though we don't have a lot in common, there's enough...

It seems too soon for Shepard to be gone, but not really. He was only a few years older than me, but he clearly had a greater ability to share his inside and insight than I do. Those who sing his praises now that he is gone probably don't quite know what he was really doing. I sometimes wonder if he did.

Vaya con dios, amigo.

It Was Fifty Years Ago Today...

My oh my. How time flies.

Monterey International Pop Festival Poster
June 16, 17,18, 1967

I actually don't remember how we got there or exactly when we left the Central Valley for the Coast, but I do remember arriving in Monterey in the late afternoon and checking into a motel (the name of which I don't recall) a short distance from the fairgrounds where the festival would be held. There were four of us, I think: myself and soon-to-be Ms. Ché and Rick and Jackie. That's my memory, but Rick and Jackie may have had their own room. Rick (changed the spelling to Ric ) became one of the more notorious members of the Cockettes (performing as ?? Maxine??) in San Francisco. I don't know what happened with Jackie.

We had tickets for some of the performances, either afternoon or evening. Friday was evening only; Saturday and Sunday were afternoon and evening shows.

The line up was stunning.

Faulty though my memory has become, I think we had tickets for Friday evening, Saturday afternoon and evening and Sunday evening, but we didn't go to the Saturday afternoon show, or possibly we didn't have tickets for Saturday afternoon but listened to it outside the venue.

I recall we spent quite a lot of time on the fairgrounds in the daytime enjoying the people and the booths, and the smells of incense and patchouli and marijuana, and it was probably Saturday afternoon because I don't remember seeing Country Joe and the Fish, Canned Heat, Steve Miller, Quicksilver and the other performers (including Janis and Big Brother) that afternoon. I remember hearing them, though.

Of course when the movie came out, memories got even more confused. Because I remember the movie performance of Big Brother in the afternoon, but my memory of seeing them perform was in the evening. Janis and a whole lot more.

We had box seats for some shows, seats on the flat arena floor for others. The venue was the Monterey County Fairgrounds rodeo arena, also used for the Monterey Jazz Festival and other events throughout the year.

I remember it was cold outside most of the time, and foggy much of the time. Drippy. There wasn't anywhere to escape the wet. So you just went with it.

About 25,000 attended over the three days of the festival. It was a lot of people but it wasn't too many, not even close to too many. We never felt too crowded, and everybody was mellow including the sheriff's deputies manning the fairgrounds and directing traffic and so on. In fact, they were so mellow we wondered if they were enjoying certain substances with much of the crowd.

I don't remember acid, though Rick may have had some. Marijuana, however, was pervasive, and it may have been there that I first indulged. I'm not sure. Marijuana has never agreed with me -- raging headaches and puts me to sleep -- so I rarely indulged back then, and haven't at all for decades.

Rick was tripping most of the time so I imagine he had dropped acid, but I didn't know him well, so I couldn't tell for sure, and we rarely saw him during performances. I think he was backstage for a while, but he was with us during Jimmy Hendrix and The Who. Jackie was with us pretty much the whole time, but I didn't know her well either. They were friends of Ms Ché's but I'm not sure how they and she had hooked up.

Ms. Ché had long been involved with teen bands in the Valley, so I assume that's how they and she got together.

At the time, I looked something like one of the members of a British duo, tall, thin, longish reddish hair, glasses, vaguely hippie-ish garb, mostly castoffs and thrift-store finds thrown together. I remember I had a navy pea coat and a green woolen Eisenhower jacket. Suede boots. Flowered shirt and a bright blue one. A cream-colored knitted turtleneck.

We had no money at all. How we afforded this adventure, I have no idea. At the time, we didn't have a car, so I think we must have ridden with Rick and Jackie, and it may have been Jackie's car, come to think of it. I don't think it was a GTO but it may have been a Pontiac Le Mans, 1964? Maybe. I don't remember.

But we had a motel room for all three days, and the fairgrounds were within walking distance. I think we ate at a nearby Sambo's a time or two. Again, where we got the money, I don't know. But we had enough for food and gas and lodging; we'd bought the tickets well in advance.

When we left on Monday morning, we went to San Francisco and dropped Rick off in the Haight and then headed back to the Valley. We'd go to San Francisco as often as we could and even took to flying down to Los Angeles now and then on the $19 PSA flights to see shows or visit with friends.

This pattern went on throughout the Summer of Love, and though I don't think we were hippies or wanted to be, we were definitely counterculture in that we were living far less materialistically than we'd been brought up to be, and we were living simply compared to most of those we knew and our families. Focus was on music and people and finding new answers to old problems.

Through various steps and travels it led us eventually to New Mexico -- where we might have gone long before, but we didn't -- where a remnant of the counterculture remains, much as it does in enclaves all over the country. Some of it is very stupid and stupefying. Yet some of it is deeply rooted and fundamental. There is a tendency to want to throw it all out and start over. But you know what? There always was.

Onward.

[Pennebaker has blocked most of the clips from his film of Monterey Pop from YouTube and the other video sites, but a restored version of the film will be shown in Santa Fe next month. We'll probably go -- if our health permits.

Highlights  of the Festival for us included Janis Joplin with Big Brother, The Who, the Animals, Simon and Garfunkel, Jefferson Airplane, Moby Grape, Mamas and Papas, Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds, Hugh Masakela, and some I don't remember. Eg: I barely remember the Dead at all... so it goes...]


Our Banana Republic -- Memories and The TINA Principle

[OT: Oxygen! I got the small tanks yesterday. What relief. Couldn't deal with the big ones and the huge "portable"concentrator. Well, it's got wheels, so yah, it can be rolled from room to room, so there's that. Portability! The small tanks, about the size of a large wine bottle, can be carried about with a shoulder strap and the oxygen is dispensed in little bursts as you breathe. They last much longer than the big tanks that way, 4 hours or more as opposed to an hour and a half or less. I like it. And let me tell you, it is the simple things these days that make me smile... Oh my yes...]

Gold plated toilets. Damn, Dude has gold-plated everything. WTF? Why would anybody even want that?

But let's look back in our history. Do they teach history any more? They say that Civics isn't taught any more, so maybe they're not teaching history either.

Ms. Ché and I were yakking the other day about Our Day ("Why can't they be like we were, perfect in every way?")  We've long been convinced that our years (1965-66)  were the last high school graduating classes in California to get a comprehensive education. It was downhill from there, and we cite as evidence our nieces who went to the same high school I did. Things had changed radically from Our Day. And they, our nieces, did not get anything like the education we did. I wouldn't say they got an education at all.

We had to take six periods in class every day throughout three years in high school and one year (9th grade) in junior high -- it wasn't called middle school in those days. We took foreign language  -- Ms Ché Latin and Spanish, me French all four years; science, history, math, social studies, civics, English, Ms Ché was also taking performing arts classes and performing in plays; I wrote a couple of plays in college prep English classes which were then performed by the drama students. Electives were few, and for me, there was almost no time for much besides regular college prep classes (it wasn't called Advance Placement until several years after we graduated and went on to higher education... another story entirely.) We had to successfully complete 250 units as I recall to graduate. In order to receive scholarships and other benefits to go to college or university, our grade points had to be above 3.2, which wasn't an easy challenge in those days. Our teacher worked us hard and expected excellence.

My senior English teacher was a Stanford graduate married to State University drama professor, and her standard for us was modeled on Stanford's English class requirements. It was her intent that whether or not we went to Stanford (I think only one of those in my senior English class did) we would be prepared for any college or university English class, and because we would be prepared for that, we would be prepared for any other college course as well.

My French teacher was a Columbia graduate who had been a student at the Sorbonne when Paris fell to the Nazis. She spent almost a year in Nazi controlled Paris before she was "miraculously" able to return to the United States. Her last name was Cohen, and when she told us about this, we thought "Oh my god, she's just lucky she wasn't sent to the camps for liquidation." She said she had friends who were rounded up, but that there was little chance she would be. Not only was she American -- and at the time, the US was not at war with Germany -- but she wasn't a Jew, she was a WASP from Long Island. She would marry a Jew later, but at the time, she didn't feel she was under any particular threat because of her religion or nationality, though she knew people who were, and it tore her apart. She  was just glad to get out of there, and when she returned to Paris after the War, she said she was devastated. The city had survived more or less intact, but the people were so traumatized she wondered if they would ever recover from what they'd been through.

My chemistry teacher's last name was Tsuda. He was Nisei, and he was sent to the camps during the War. He was a teenager at Manzanar, and his experience there shaped his attitude toward the "America" as an adult. He graduated from UC Berkeley with high honors, but he had to wait until after the War, and until after some of the Anti-Jap agitation in California had died down before he could attend and complete his degree. All of the high school students he taught were white... go figure. He had no open animosity toward us, but I wouldn't say he liked us or gave a shit about us, either. I never did learn chemistry to speak of, and I doubt that more than one or two students in my class did.

When I was in high school, I lived next to the site of one of the transit camps for Japanese-Americans on their way to relocation. I knew there had been a military facility there called Camp Kohler. It had burned down-- I didn't know when at the time, but I found out later the fire was in 1947 when the camp facilities were being used to house returning US veterans and their families. All that was left of the camp were the concrete barracks pads, charred wood, fused glass, bits and pieces of metal, overgrown asphalt roads, and a spirit. A dark spirit.

I don't recall if Mr. Tsuda ever spent time at Camp Kohler before being sent to Manzanar (probably not, but who knows... ) What I do recall was his barely contained rage about what had happened to him and his family under the Stars and Stripes. I recall he mentioned being in Japan before the war and how beautiful it was, and he had returned after the war, I think he said in 1952 or 53 (Korean War? Was he a vet? I don't remember....) and it broke his heart. So much of Japan was still in ruins, of course. But it was the  broken people that hurt his heart more. I don't recall him specifically mentioning Hiroshima and Nagasaki but it was very much on our minds given the nuclear tension we were all living under during the Cold War.

I could go on describing my memories of high school and my teachers, but these examples give an idea of the kinds of people they were and the kinds of experiences they shared with us. Wartime memories were of course very important because they had so strongly shaped our parents and our teachers, and WWII had completely transformed the world we came into as post-War Boomers.

There was a level of prosperity and well-being that Americans had never experienced before. There were also severe strains and the early stages of general social unrest that seemed to begin in California and spread outward from there. Of course it had not started in California, but it became focused there as the youth rebellion took hold and Hippies became a Thing.

Ms. Ché and I were on the cusp of all that.

No doubt we were rebels, but generally were not part of the Hippie scene -- which we saw for its self-evident commercial aspects more than its social importance. We would go to San Francisco from time to time during the hey-day of Hippiedom, but it was not necessarily an attractive thing. It was just another Thing, not the only thing. We had friends who moved to the City and became part of the Scene there, and we saw it as them being who they were, not as something we were compelled to emulate or necessarily wanted to.

We did attend the Monterey Pop Festival the summer after the Summer of Love, and we almost went to Altamont, but thankfully did not.

In 1966, Ronald Reagan was -- "impossibly" -- elected governor of California promising to bring an end to the student unrest, suppress the rebellions in the black ghettos, and ensure that nothing like that ever happened again.

Ever.

His methods were cruel and violent on the one hand, more subtly destructive on the other. He deliberately set out to wreck California's Progressive operating system, and he largely succeeded. After California's Progressive Era was brought to a screeching halt under Reagan, he and his cronies would  apply the lessons learned nationwide.

And so here we are, Banana Republic.

Progressivism was itself the Enemy. Ripping it out root and branch was neither wise nor possible, but what the Reaganites did was set in motion its self-implosion and collapse, first by discrediting it, then by pushing on carefully selected pressure points -- including public education, mental health care, and "law and order" -- to produce desired results in time if not immediately. They knew what they wanted  but they didn't always know how to get there.

What they wanted -- and largely got -- was a reversion to pre-Progressive California and ultimately a pre-Progressive America.

In other words, a Banana Republic ruled by caudillos, whose favor had to be curried or else. Corporate control of government would replace Progressive "experts" and public servants. Elections would be manipulated for desired results. Tax burdens would be lightened for the well-off (why should they be forced to pay taxes anyway?) and fees in lieu of taxes would be increased for everyone else. Government would be operated by and for the rich, and barely function at all for anyone else. Public education would be administered to death. There would be no more "free" higher education in California. Students would pay increasing fees and tuition until going to college at all would be too expensive to even think about. The quality of public education at every level would decline, to the point where high school students would graduate pig-ignorant, and college graduates would barely begin to comprehend what an average high school student understood in previous generations.

"All against all," "greed is good," and "There Is No Alternative" would become the new reality.

And so it was. So it is.

I have long been a critic of Progressivism for cause, but not necessarily the same cause as its Reaganite critics. It's racist and authoritarian at its core, even in decline, and those factors were in large part responsible for the uprisings that presaged the Reaganite reaction. Progressivism led to some good things to be sure, but the costs were very high, especially for marginalized populations. Progressivism could not mask its racism and authoritarianism, though in a late fight for survival, it tried to.

The argument was that compared to Reaganism, Progressivism was less racist and less authoritarian. The lesser of two evils, eh?

Besides, what are you going to do? You have a choice between the radical return to the Bad Old Days or continuing on a failing course of what was seen as public sector stupidity.

Nobody I know of in the political realm bethought themselves to come up with something better than either choice.

There was no alternative. "None of the Above" was not an option.

Nixon was elected president in 1968, and compared to Reagan, he was practically a Communist. He was a genuine California Progressive but on the dark side of the movement, and eventually he was driven from office, not so much because he was a criminal, but I believe because he was going bonkers and had become unstable and unreliable. His judgment was so severely impaired and his actions so arbitrary that he was seen as a clear and present danger to the survival of the  Republic. That's something Our Rulers do not and cannot talk about. We the Rabble are not to know just how incompetent Our Rulers are. Please.

Incompetence is part of the package of public sector destruction that Reaganites set in motion in California and spread all over the country once they achieved the White House.

They didn't want competent public servants, and they saw to it that at the Rabble level, competence was often unavailable from government. This was actually a genius move because it destroyed confidence in government ("of the people and by the people") to get necessary things done. The only success allowed to government in the future would be police, prisons and jails, and in time, even that would be largely taken away with the substitution of private prisons, much like private schools would replace government schools.

They used some of the social strengths of the liberal-Progressives against them, and it worked.

I would say that initially the Reaganites were very weak, and they didn't really know how to do what they wanted to do. Progressives then offered them  a helping hand to get things done. They set the stage and the standard model for their own destruction. They cooperated and collaborated. Oh my, we've seen so many examples of this throughout history, haven't we?

We see echoes of it in the actions of the few Democrats still in office nationally. I wouldn't call them Progressives, good doG no, but they act as the rump remainder of what used to be Progressives.

They are notorious collaborationists.

It is one reason among many they aren't elected any more. They offer no policy alternatives, only procedural and personality ones. Bless their hearts.

The Mini-Mes of Destruction. USA! USA!

You gotta elect me cause I'm not him! YAY Me!

Jeebus what a goon show.

Thanks to Jill Stein -- bless her heart-- we're finding out just what a fucked up scam this latest election was. Honestly, at this point there is no way to tell who the voters chose in the battleground states, as there is no way to accurately count or recount their votes in too many jurisdictions. There's no way to know.

We've been experiencing fucked up scam "elections" for so long that a lot of people seem to take it for granted and accept the announced results on faith -- because you can't do anything else. There is no way to show that faith results are right or wrong. They just are what they are.

Electoral fraud appears to be pervasive but unprovable -- by design.

Voter fraud is something else altogether and appears to be rare, but maybe not. Again, there's no way to tell.

And in the common perception manipulated by the media, there's no difference. The two are conflated all the time, deliberately and with malice aforethought.

It's becoming very clear that we do not know and we cannot know who the voters in the battleground/recount states actually chose to become president. And if we can't know the actual vote in those states, it puts into question the actual vote in every other state.

And that's not even considering the active voter suppression efforts that have been under way throughout the country for years.

Reports indicate that millions of otherwise eligible voters were prevented from voting or had their votes tossed out due to a wide variety of suppression efforts, and in at least some cases due to the whim of election officials. The suppression efforts during the primaries were highlighted -- and they were extraordinarily varied and frequent. By the general election, it was all but taken for granted that the same sort of suppression would occur on an even wider scale, and nothing would or could be done about it.

After all, There Is No Alternative.

How much longer this corrupt and corrupting system can endure is anybody's guess.

With the advent of Golden Boy to the White House (will he choose to live in his hotel, will he sell or rent rooms in the White House, say tuned campers!) the inherent instabilities may become so severe that it all collapses.

I'd say we're close to that point now.

I've thought for some time that Trump will not be inaugurated Jan 20, but if he is, he won't serve more than a year in office. This is based on instinct rather than any evidence, so I won't say it's a prediction, but because he is personally so unstable -- and is known to be -- it seems to me unlikely that the Deep-State/Permanent Government will allow him to rule as president or anything else.

On the other hand, I'm not seeing any effort at all to contain him.

So.... we don't know. We can't say. And for the moment, there is no alternative to his ascension.

As they say, We Are So Fucked. No matter what.

What a whirled, what a whirled.
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Meanwhile on the Standing Rock/Archambault front. Wow. As I expected, the announcement that everybody should go home, they weren't needed any more, was met with shock, outrage, and resistance. Chad Iron Eyes, a prominent Standing Rock Sioux, all but called Archambault out for this bullshit. But some people did try to leave in the blizzard and some ran off the road and otherwise wound up in dire straits. What was he thinking? This is crazy.

There have been many attempts to rationalized Archambault's statements as primarily a matter of "safety" -- but when so many people who tried to leave were caught in the blizzard and were stuck, the "safety" argument fell apart. Safety for whom, eh? Not the Water Protectors.

Most of those who stayed were obviously better off than some of those who tried to leave.

Apparently there have been some modifications since the "leave now" statements were issued. Realizing -- gee, ya think? -- that leaving under blizzard conditions is probably unwise, the tribe and (interestingly) Morton County and AoCE officials have extended their hands to "help" by opening shelters for those who don't have winterized camping facilities, and for those who would rather not travel in such weather. Morton County officials (the source of so much pain) have said they will respond to any emergency and provide assistance to anyone who needs it due to the weather. This after saying they wouldn't.

I've been around Indian politics enough to recognize or at least suspect what's going on, but I'd rather not get into it right now -- because I can't do anything about it, and it will have to be resolved one way or another by those on scene. I don't doubt it will be, and it might get pretty ugly.

Indeed, what a whirled.