The Cocoon That Man Cannot Escape
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
(Originally published
© March 15, 2015/August 1, 2021)
This is the second chapter of a book that has
been previously published in the format of serial segments.
NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND
History is but the
unrolled scroll of prophecy.
James A. Garfield (1831-1881), President of the United States,
Assassinated in Office
We should all hang on to
our ideals, but we should also be careful not to have extravagantly high
expectations. There is no perfect system, no one answer, no ideology that will
produce a human paradise, and no political messiah who will ride in and save us
from ourselves. If paradise there be, it will be found somewhere else besides
Earth. We are stuck with ourselves, the human race, ever prone to fallibility
and folly.
Charles Reese (1937-2013), American syndicated columnist
Over
time, man cannot seem to help himself from entering the cocoon of Nowhere Land as Nowhere Man. Either he
misreads the signs that he trusts, or mistrusts the signs that he reads, and
finds himself in the middle of the cocoon or the cocoon in the middle of events
that controls him. In either case, what he believed was the most auspicious course to take becomes the
course most auspicious to believe was taken, leaving him with the feeling of
being in control of events when events are in control of his feelings. We have
had one hundred years of captivating fascination with this cocoon. It is called
our American optimism. It has haunted
American history and has only been avoided in periodic interruptions from the
nation’s preferred isolation.
There
was the Spanish-American War (1898)
that was declared after the suspect sinking of the battleship USS Maine in Havana Harbor, Cuba. The
Maine had been sent in support of the Cuban rebels. A New York state
politician, Theodore Roosevelt, created an army of volunteers with himself as
colonel, calling themselves the “Rough Riders,” and rode that bluster to a bold
iconic reputation.
Then a series of
auspicious events followed for the colonel. President William McKinley’s vice
president, Garret Augustus Hobart, died in office in 1899, and Theodore
Roosevelt was appointed vice president. Hobart was the sixth vice president to
die in office.
President William
McKinley, only six months into his second term, was assassinated on September
14, 1901. Theodore Roosevelt assumed the presidency and held that office until
March 4, 1909. During that period he forced America out of its cocoon
announcing to the world that America was no longer asleep, that the United
States “Spoke softly but carried a big stick,” meaning he
would enforce the Monroe Doctrine defending any of the
Americas attacked by aggressors and any of the American territories spread
across the globe.
Teddy Roosevelt, as he
was affectionately known, persuaded the US Congress to support the completion
of the Panama Canal that had been
abandoned by the French government. After gaining the U.S. Senate’s approval in
late 1902, Roosevelt mobilized engineering and construction forces to build the
canal with it being opened five years after he left office on August 15, 1914.
President Theodore
Roosevelt oversaw the realization of a long-term United States goal, a
trans-isthmian canal. Throughout the 19th century, American and
British leaders and businessmen wanted to ship goods quickly and cheaply
between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Roosevelt brought that quest to
fruition. This engineering feat changed the world opening the East and West to
each other politically and socially as well as economically.
For this and many other
bold moves, his likeness is sculpted in stone on Mount Rushmore along with
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln, Americans who led by
embracing the folly of the cocoon and thus avoiding its madness. But alas, the
cocoon is too intoxicating to be avoided except for short spells.
President
Woodrow Wilson was one of the architects of The League of Nations after
WWI, but he couldn’t get the U.S. Congress to support admission.
His famous “Fourteen-Point Plan,” which was
largely adopted by The League of Nations, was given to a joint
session of Congress, January 8, 1918. It failed to win Senate approval and the
League of Nations commenced in January 1920 without the participation of the
United States, which ultimately led to its failure. It needed American financial
support to remain viable.
The problem was that Wilson, the Democratic
president, was unwilling to compromise with Henry Cabot Lodge, the senior
Republican senator from Massachusetts. Compromise with the opposition usually
can produce better results than refusing to negotiate, as we have seen.
During this same period, the Temperance
League was successful in its campaign to prohibit the sale of alcohol
with the 18th Amendment
signed into law on January 29, 1919. This led to the personification of the
cocoon in the gangster era of Al Capone of Chicago where bootlegging,
racketeering, and murder-for-hire became big business, while the rich and
powerful continued to have their booze in defiance of the law with impunity.
Prohibition ended with the passing of the 21st Amendment on
December 5, 1933, in the first administration of President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (FDR). You would think that the nation had learned its lesson from
this attempt to legislate morality, but decades later, after WWII, the Supreme
Court of the United States was forced to play the parent to a nation of
children who clung to the cocoon.
The American populace
refused to grow up and face the reality that half the population was women and
that African Americans had long ago been given full citizenship with the Emancipation Proclamation. Those in the
cocoon preferred the comfort of their illusions.
While President Wilson
was still in office, but in failing health when the Women’s Suffrage
Act, the 19th Amendment
to the Constitution was ratified on August 18, 1920. Two-thirds of the
states ratifying it to make it the law of the land. This would lead to
the Feminine Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. One of its
accomplishments was the Supreme Court ruling on January 22, 1973, in Roe vs.
Wade that gave a woman the right to choose an abortion. It has led to a
division between those who favor “pro-choice” and “pro-life.”
Republican President
Warren Harding replaced Wilson as president on March 4, 1921, only to die
somewhat strangely, believed to be from food poisoning, on August 2, 1923. In
his brief presidency, his administration was rocked with scandal and outrage,
and some might argue, convincingly, that his administration never left the
cocoon.
President Harding was accused of having an
illicit affair in office, and then there was the Teapot Dome Scandal,
and an oil reserve scandal. Secret leasing of federal oil reserves by the
Secretary of the Interior, Albert Bacon Fall, involved transferring naval
oil-reserve lands from the US Navy to the Department of Interior in 1921. Fall
granted Harry F. Sinclair of Mammoth Oil Company exclusive rights to the Teapot Dome (Wyoming) Reserves, April 7, 1922, for a bribe of
some $200,000, an act, once it became public, crippled the Harding
administration.
Vice President John Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933)
took office when Harding died, and restored public confidence in the presidency
(1923-1929) by simply not rocking the boat, proceeding on an even keel. An
unassuming quiet man, Coolidge embodied the spirit and temperament of what was
taken to be that of the middle class displaying a genius to seem like them,
refusing to make waves, entertain controversy, or push the envelope, dying at
the age of 60 on January 5, 1933, only two months before his successor, Herbert
Hoover, would leave office on March 4, 1933.
Coolidge believed in
small government, wasn’t much into social programs, and had a laissez-faire approach
to the presidency, which made him something of a caretaker president. He saw no
reason to leave the cocoon.
When those in charge of
events, whatever the function, events have a way of eventually taking charge of
them. This happened in the 1920s and has been repeated with some regularity
ever since.
The country was going
through the “Roaring Twenties,” which took on the appearance between
a nervous breakdown and an identity crisis. The repeal of prohibition and the
women’s voting act was right amid the speakeasies and flappers, women smoking
in public, and morality taking a holiday.
This was also prime
fodder for writers. There was the “Lost Generation” of
American literature with its acolytes of Hemingway, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald,
Stein, Eliot, Dos Passos, Cumming, Macleish, Crane, Lewis, Pound, and Faulkner.
This was quickly followed by the “Beat Generation” of
Salinger, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Solomon, Huncke, Carr, Kesey, Burroughs, and
Smith. It was the age of escape from the cocoon while burrowing more deeply
into its center. The cocoon was not a rest stop from Nowhere Land but the new
residence of Nowhere Man.
Engineer Herbert Hoover,
president from 1929-1933, campaigned for the presidency promising “a
chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.” He was selling the
cocoon of utopianism in defiance of how delusional the optimism was. The United
States was feeling its oats, and like the brash young nation that it was, it
was pulling out all stops from Main Street to Wall Street.
But seven months into President Hoover’s
administration, in October 1929, the United States economy crashed, and with it
came The Great Depression,
the worst economic depression in man’s history that would last for ten years or
to the start of World War II in September 1939.
The Great Depression was the
deepest and longest-lasting economic downturn in the history of Western
industrialized society. It sent Wall Street into a panic and wiped out millions
of investors. Over the next several decades, consumer spending dropped
precipitously, causing sharp declines in industrial output and rising levels of
unemployment with some 13-15 million American workers unemployed, which was at
the time nearly half of the nation’s workforce.
Though the reforms of FDR provided some relief,
the nation would not recover until American workers were fully employed in
working 24/7 in support of the war effort from early 1942 until well into the
1950s. In the process, the United States became the manufacturing center for a
world decimated by the collateral damage of war.
* *
*
Once the cocoon takes on
the air of invincibility, the air in the cocoon becomes invincible. In the case
of the United States, it took on the role of being the global policeman. The
first evidence of this was only five years after WWII (June 25, 1950), when the
United States led a United Nations force in support of South Korea against
North Korea and China. It was never a declared war but was considered a police
action.
With the signing of the
armistice, North Korea was divided from South Korea at the 38th parallel which became a demilitarized zone. This has held
tenuously if also precariously until the present day with still more than
30,000 American troops in South Korea sixty-three years after the end of these
hostilities, which ended on July 27, 1953.
Then there is Vietnam. The
United States’ involvement commenced innocently shortly after Vietnam won its
independence from France in 1954. Innocent interventions invariably are pesky
reminders that the cocoon is waiting to reemerge with insouciant finality. The
footprints of Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B.
Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon are on this Cold War-era proxy war that occurred
between November 1, 1955, and April 30, 1975.
More than 55,000 American fighting men and women
lost their lives in support of South Vietnam against North Vietnam in the
Vietnam War, a war from which the U.S. hastily withdrew in defeat,
miscalculating with the belief that Vietnam would fall to China in a domino
effect. Forty-one years later (2016), the United States was trading with the
reintegrated Vietnam nation.
April 29, 1975, President Gerald Ford, who
assumed the presidency on August 9, 1974, when President Nixon resigned,
ordered the evacuation of 7,000 Americans and South Vietnamese from Saigon,
along with hundreds of civilians swarming the helicopters frantic to evacuate
the walled-in US Embassy surrounded by 30,000 North Vietnamese troops.
President Ford was
defeated for the presidency by peanut farmer, Jimmy Carter, former Governor of
Georgia who assumed the presidency on January 20, 1977. It was President
Carter’s misfortune that a series of events would surface on his watch that had
been allowed to fester in the cocoon of Nowhere Land.
There
was the Iran Hostage Crisis in which
more than sixty American diplomats and citizens were held hostage for 444 days
(November 4 1979 to January 20, 1981) after a group of Iranian students
belonging to the Muslim Student Followers
of Imam and supporters of the Iranian
Revolution stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, and took charge.
In the wake of the OPEC
1973 oil embargo and the following 1979 energy crisis, stagflation began to
afflict the American economy. Unemployment kept climbing from 5.1 percent in
January 1974 to 7.5 percent in May 1980 to reach 10.8 percent by September
1982. After the oil shock, inflation soared to 13.5 percent in 1980, which had
been on averaged 3.2 percent annually in the post-WWII era. Job cutbacks were
particularly severe in housing, automobile manufacturing, and steel production.
Most
of this happened during President Jimmy Carter’s administration, and like
Hoover who took the blame for The Great Depression, and FDR the credit for the
US economic miraculous recovery, which was the war production of WWII, Carter
took the blame for the Iran Hostage
Crisis, the oil embargo, and the double-digit rise of unemployment and
inflation, only to be rescued by President Ronald Reagan with his massive
defense spending and tax cuts, along with the fortuitous collapse of the Soviet
Union.
There
is a lesson to be learned here and it doesn’t have the face of the President of
the United States. Nowhere Man is always lurking in the shadows of events in
Nowhere Land, threatening to burst through the cocoon with disturbing finality,
sometimes embarrassingly so.
We saw this with
President Johnson’s “Great Society” with his “guns and butter” approach to the
times, sending 500,000 troops to Vietnam and launching, at the same time, the
most ambitious social welfare program since FDR.
We saw it once again when President George W. Bush
preemptive invasion of Iraq after Osama bin
Landen led the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York City, followed by
a military victory of Iraq, only to misread the relationship between the Sunnis
and Shiites of Iraq, the two major denominations of Islam.
About 90 percent of the
world’s Muslim population is Sunni with the other 10 percent Shia, while
President Bashar Assad was a Shiite, the Sunnis are a majority of the Muslim
community in the Arab world despite Shiites being the majority in Iraq and
Iran.
Moreover,
in Afghanistan, the practice of Sunni Islam is dominant with 80 to 90 percent
of the population of 32 million. The War in Afghanistan (2001 to present)
followed the September 11, 2001 attack on the Twin Towers of New York City,
with the United States aiming to dismantle al-Qaeda and deny it as safe haven
in Afghanistan by removing the Taliban from power.
Like
the footprints in Vietnam, presidents George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George
W. Bush, and Barack Obama are very apparent in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now
Syria. It is quite clear that since WWII the United States is seemingly inept
when the enemy is not Anglo-Saxon or Russian Serbs, that is, not white and
schooled in the tradition and culture of the West. When the enemy is
of another ethnicity, operations take on the simile of the cocoon of Nowhere
Land in Nowhere Man, creating one pusillanimous embarrassment after another.
* *
*
Postmodern Western man
finds himself in the cocoon of his greed and paranoia, false optimism and
pride, hedonistic appetites and whimsical longings, insulated from the
world-at-large in a dreamlike wonderland. It has taken Western man a little more than a century of sensate
fixation to create this self-indulgent domicile with technology as the new
religion of hope and salvation.
Nowhere Man is bound by
the logic of reason in the name of progress however, he defines progress.
Whatever the definition, it is never enough and that is the problem. Man seeks
contentment but moves constantly away from it by dent of his unconscious drive
for more with no conscious concern beyond his cocoon.
He always needs more,
always needs better, for he must constantly be on the go to avoid that ominous
shadow of the cocoon that chases him day and night always about to catch up
with him around the corner.
As a consequence,
Nowhere Man has driven the planet Earth to the brink of extinction through the
noxious combination of drive and denial fueled by solipsistic reason.
This has transformed Nature into a wasteland as
the heart of man has been cut from the body to be triumphantly controlled by
the head.
You look at devastated
Syria with its beautiful cities in ruin, 250,000 men, women, and children dead,
collateral damage to senseless bombing and warfare in a civil war that has made
millions refugees, and you wonder about the sanity of man be he from the East
or the West, the North or the South, whatever his ethnicity, color or culture.
It is the story of the
soul that has been subjugated to the head that has no sense of soul. It is man’s deep-rooted fascination with the idea
of utopia now possible by the omniscient god of science with no need for
spiritual dalliance or reflection.
Yet,
the spirit is an invisible web that touches all surfaces and is there to
rescue Nonsensical Man. The survival instinct resides in the spirit. No one lacks instinctual spiritual health
more than Nowhere Man in his Nowhere Land.
The desire for utopia, which means “nowhere,” is the
dream of a future where there is only happiness and no nightmarish discord. So
it has been throughout man’s history. British literary theorist Terry Eagleton
(born, 1943) calls happiness a holiday camp kind of word, a word that resonates
with manic grins and multicolored jackets, not least when compared to a
traumatic past. Few can argue this against a Pandora Box of
complaints of twentieth-century travesties.
German Jewish
philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) discerned in utopia a messianic power
to disrupt the present. Just as in Judaism you cannot name God, so you cannot
put a face on God’s future kingdom. Technology, as the new religion, considers
utopia the main game, the present plus more options. The future is already
here, don’t worry, folks, everything is under control, utopia is
ours! We have seized the day! But have we?
* *
*
The future is never
here. We no longer have the past. It cannot be changed. We only have the
present, and it is fleeting. The future is a fantasy production with an
assortment of prodigies on stage orchestrating technological pyrotechnics to
blind us with neutralizing splendor to relieve our angsts and confusions.
In
this production, content is pushed beyond form as Nature’s limitations are
ignored. We shall overcome! Which is to say, we shall
overcome the limits of the present and with it a new reality that brings the
future within our grasp.
Contrast
this with intrinsic utopianism as envisioned by German philosopher Theodor
Adorno (1903-1969):
Art
is magic delivered from the lie of being truth. Every work of art is an
uncommitted crime. Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but
to abjure such prescribed choices.
You
can see from this that Adorno is a philosopher for whom pessimism is more
utopian than optimism because it keeps faith with suffering so unbearable that
it cries out for redemption.
Bleak commentators such
as psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), novelists Aldous Huxley
(1894-1963), and George Orwell (1903-1950) come quickly to mind. The only magic
in the future for them is the failure of the present. Are these writers howling
in the wind as they see Nowhere Man, deeply ensconced in Nowhere Land with no
way out?
American literary critic
Fredric Jameson (born 1934) writes in Archaeologies of the Future: The
Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2006) that the
problem is to steer a course between a break so radical that we could scarcely
recognize ourselves on the other side of it, and those utopian images which
mirror our desires only because they are bound to the present.
German philosopher and
economist Karl Marx (1818-1883) answered with a solution involving a group he
called the proletariat. For him, it was the working class that
provided the vital bridge from the present into the future. This represented
for him both current reality and a harbinger of a transformed society. The
future could thus be seen as immanent in the present.
But it wasn’t a
philosopher, an intellectual, a gifted economist or social thinker but a
self-educated general and then president, Andrew
Jackson (1767-1845), who made something of a utopian break with the past in
the early days of the Democratic Republic of the United States as president
(1829-1837).
Jackson was a pivotal
figure in American history and historian Robert V. Remini (1921-2013) captures
this in a rollicking colorful three-volume account (The Course of American
Empire: 1767-1821, 1977; The Course of American Freedom:
1822-1832, 1981; The Course of American Democracy: 1833-1845, 1984) that
every American should read if only to introduce them to the self to which they
have become collectively insensitive.
If readers think the
2016 Republican Presidential Campaign has been maddening adolescents, it
doesn’t hold a candle to Jackson’s physically dangerous time. Candidates
carried sidearms, fought duels, and on occasion, were accosted by would-be
assassins. Today's candidates behave in televised debates like they are still
in short pants and haven’t matured beyond the fourth grade.
To read American
historian and diplomat Arthur Schlesinger’s (1917-2007) The Age of
Jackson (1971), the soldier-president takes on the hue of a mythological
figure consistent with Irish poet William Butler Yeats’s (1865-1939) foul
rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
Jackson’s reality
commenced when he refused to shine a British officer’s boots as an
eight-year-old, after his brother was knocked senseless by the stock of the
officer’s rifle, later dying from the injury. He had no time or temperament in
his soul much less his lifetime for Nowhere Man or Nowhere Land.
Through almost herculean effort, Andrew Jackson
forced Americans out of the cocoon of Nowhere Land, and with bold and
controversial action, gave the young American nation an identity that has held
sway to this day. Unfortunately, over the past 150 years, his kind has not
surfaced often in American leadership since Lincoln, and because of this, the
American psyche has slipped back into that repressive cocoon.
Isn’t
it remarkable that two self-educated lawyers, Jackson and Lincoln, two men who
never saw the insides of an academic university as students, have kept us on an
even keel despite repeated aberrations that were to assault their respective
presidencies saving us, again and again, from drifting towards shipwreck?
* *
*
There is a political
reality to Nowhere Land that is bound more to the present than to a vision of
the future that might transcend it. Jackson was not a thinking man; he was an
intuitive man of action that seemingly never questioned the wisdom of his
decisions. He worried little about his critics or those who might oppose him,
but he worried even less about supporters who might differ with him. He visited
Nowhere Land and would walk away from anyone who might suggest such a place
existed. He had no time for flippancies.
On
the other hand, Lincoln was a contemplative man, a brooding man, a reflective
man, a man so given to melancholy that psychiatrist Nassir Ghaemi profiles
Lincoln in “A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between
Leadership and Mental Illness” (2011), along with profiles of General
Sherman, Churchill, Gandhi, FDR, JFK, and Ted Turner, but not Andrew Jackson.
So, the boilerplate of leadership is not one-dimensional.
Today
flippancies dominate cable and network television news 24/7 as if Chinese
torture of dripping water with carefully choreographed stories repeated ad
infinitum, bombarding the senses as entertainments but not enlightenment,
titillating fantasies but not stimulating conscious thought, playing on popular
biases for ratings but failing to raise the level of tolerance, understanding,
and maturity.
Network and cable news
are gatekeepers of the cocoon of Nowhere Land. They dispense soothing
palliatives that have become narcotic confections of addictive thought.
The vehicle is a
cutting-edge technology with these cable news outlets as mind benders to the
will and wishes of capitalism's civil religion with its liturgy of progress and
dogmatic canons of the infallible authority of the one-percenters who own and
control as the lone high church in American society.
This is analogous to Orwell’s dictum of
physical want for more deadly want. Better lack bread than lack
life. The long evasion, whose only fruit is the machine.
The
arrogance of this high church has created a break with the future of the
present, which has unwittingly introduced the inevitable backlash of Islamic
radicalism. We delude ourselves that radical Islam is our enemy. Animated
cartoonist Walt Kelley (1913-1973) put it best with Pogo: We have met
the enemy and he is us. The cocoon of Nowhere Man has little to do
with Islam or any other ism, but everything to do with Nowhere Land becoming
our collective zip code.
* *
*
We have created a
disparity in the name of equality, made progress a religion with an absence of
love, promoting an ideology with a dearth of tolerance, retrogressing to the
Conquistadors of four centuries ago with blind cultural ethnocentrism. The
zealot Spanish missionaries killed indigenous cultures of the Americas in an
attempt "to save them" by imposing the Christian faith upon them
wondering centuries later the source of the collective problems of the Americas.
Were these missionaries not doing this to save
the immortal souls of these infidels, and therefore was not this an act of
great kindness?
Nowhere Man would say
"yes," in Nowhere Land with the Past Imperfect leading
to the Present Ridiculous with the Future Perfect is just over the
horizon.
When I was a young
chemist, I read marine biologist Rachel Carson’s (1907-1964) Silent
Spring, a naked outcry against the use of DDT and other chemical additives
to control insect populations in agriculture. These ravenous insects were
destroying the crops of farmers and reducing crop yields to a pittance. DDT
proved miraculous, farmers rushed to make DDT a staple of their planting
season, seeing their crop yields immediately soaring. Little to no attention
was given to the impact these chemicals were having on the ecosystem until Rachel
Carson’s book was published.
Chemical &
Engineering News was a periodical we
all read in Standard Brand’s R&D laboratory, noting Carson’s poor
grasp of chemistry. We concluded, wrongly, that her argument had no
relevance to agribusiness. We in that laboratory were residence of the
cocoon, thinking we were special because we could move chemical symbols around.
But
then I moved out of the laboratory and became a chemical company executive, and
worked in South America, Europe, and South Africa, repeatedly seeing with the
eye test that Carson was right, but my conceit still acted as a blindfold.
In South Africa, an
executive whose company was dumping pollutants into the Indian Ocean off the
coast of East London still rings in my ear. “These alarmists like Carson are
just ignorant,” he said with disdain, “they don’t seem to
understand the ocean absorbs wastes with ease.”
The chemical wastes that
he was referring to were run-offs from automobile and chemical factories. At
the time, I nodded with doting pride that we devotees of science knew best when
we were the ones who were ignorant.
My travels also took me
to the bauxite (aluminum) refineries of Jamaica and Suriname. Driving through
the countryside I saw countless polluted rivers and streams. I still deluded
myself with the belief that they would eventually purify themselves.
This was the 1960s with
my eyes taking in dried-out river beds, abandoned factories with leaking paint,
and oil drums clearly in sight. There were countless farms with fallow fields
of parched earth as far as the eye could see, and yet nothing registered. The
canary in the mine was missing from my consciousness.
What an apt metaphor,
the canary in the mine. Miners would carry a caged canary into
a coal mine to detect odorless carbon monoxide, which would kill the canary
before it killed the miners, thus providing the crucial warning to exit the
mine with haste.
In Johannesburg, I lived
in the lap of luxury a working-class young man who was out of his depth in a
dying colonial world. It was like being an actor in a play, not real, not
consequential, a little like Nowhere Land. I was an American chemical
engineering executive sent to South Africa to facilitate the formation of a new
chemical conglomerate.
The business people in
South Africa were all British, while the technical people were mainly
Afrikaner, the servants were all Bantus, many far from their homelands and
families. I gave them no mind. It was a leisurely existence entirely in keeping
with the fading glory of the British Empire. I thought this is what it
must be like to be a privileged member of the aristocracy. Instead of
being embarrassed as an interloper coming from such humble history, I
felt, I have arrived! Perhaps I can be forgiven as I was a boy
in my thirties in a man suit, but not yet a man.
Then a neighbor’s Bantu
servant murdered my gardener over the affections of my maid. The events that
followed were like that canary in the coal mine. The death of my gardener was
handled as if it were a dog that had been killed. I volunteered to participate
in the inquest, only to find there was none. Another neighbor, a professor at Witwatersrand University, said
matter-of-factly, “Life is not that precious to the
Bantu; they’re always killing each other.”
The shock of this caused me to take notice of
things for the first time. I was on a green island in a black sea where the
white population was only 3.5 million and the Bantu population 12.5 million.
Afrikaner whites, who controlled the South African government, governed the
Bantus, Coloreds, and Indians with draconian severity.
The government’s policy
was called “apartheid,” which meant the separate development of the
races. Major tribes of the Bantu had homelands set aside, which were mainly
rural areas, whereas most of the jobs were in the industrial centers and
metropolitan areas where most Bantu worked. When they were in these city work
centers, they had to carry a green card that was stamped by their employer
justifying their presence. Should they not have the green card, or should it be
delinquent, they could be put in jail, and many were.
Coming from Iowa, I knew of the Tama
Indian Reservation which was not far from my home. These Native Americans
from the Mesquakie (“red earth people”) tribe lived in less than ideal
conditions when I was a boy. I wouldn’t have known that but for visiting Tama
one day with my da when I was eleven.
He
told me that we were Irish American, but these people were Native Americans,
something we could never be. I thought that strange, but never probed what he
meant. That stayed with me and gave me some insight into South Africa’s Bantus
when I visited the South West African Township (SOWETO) where
most Bantus who worked in Johannesburg lived. Like Tama, it was not an ideal
place.
Both places reminded me of
a cocoon, the cocoon I’m now describing as Nowhere Land, finding me feeling
sorry for the Tama Indians when I was eleven, and for the Bantu when I was
thirty-three, but now in my eighties, I feel it was the Afrikaners and the
British, and Americans such as myself who were in the cocoon in 1968.
* *
*
To put it another way,
before the death of my gardener, I felt that I had fallen to earth and landed
in utopia, but not as Nowhere Land, but as Paradise.
South Africa was majestically beautiful and its people of many different hues,
enchantingly exquisite beyond measure. The special relationship I had with my
gardener is novelized in DEVLIN, A Novel (2011).
My personality is not
that of a crusader or even that of an advocate. I like to read books, do my
job, and shut the world out as much as I can. But after the gardener’s death, I
went on a bit of a tear. I tried to bend the ear of my parish priest in Rosebank,
a suburb of Johannesburg where I lived, but I couldn’t get a rise out of him.
Nor were the nuns who taught my children interested in hearing about the
gardener’s murder or my concerns about the abuses of apartheid. Even visits to
the Rosebank Police Department to see if the case had received any closure
proved disappointing.
That was fifty years ago. Ever since I have been
interested in culture and how the few set the rules that control the many, and
the many who then are bound to follow them.
This reality covers the
landscape of Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land wherever I have been, and wherever I
have gone. Nearly all my books address the problem of mindless self-indulgent
man soiling this rich tapestry we call earth with its many peoples in cavalier
style failing to realize that while man has a finite lifespan so does Mother
Nature. As is man, Nature is subject to the laws of entropy.
Entropy
is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. According to this law, a
system moves toward equilibrium, that is, it tends to run down and back to
zero, or death in the case of organic
life and to its original state in the case of inorganic life. This is a move
from order to increasing disorder to eventual equilibrium.
As a television (PBS)
program illustrated, a metropolitan city, uninhabited and unattended, shows
signs of moving to disorder in six months. Six years later, it is hardly
recognizable. Sixty years later, the proud city center of glass, brick, and
steel has become buried in vegetation with only vermin and other animals its
inhabitants.
Only through negative
entropy, that is, reinventing, redesigning, resurrecting, rejuvenating, and
rebuilding constantly can this process be reversed, and then it is an ongoing
relentless commitment.
Nothing
is permanent. Everything is in a state of constant transition, constant motion,
and constant change. The world population has increased by 350 percent since I
was born. What does that say about how we husband humanity and calibrate
humanity’s drain on the planet’s resources?
If
you could freeze-frame time, you might sense that we are on the edge of night
and the brink of despair for not all is well with the state of the planet. The
earth for the last several decades has been sending distress signals to Nowhere
Man that the population explosion of mankind and his wild economic expansionism
is killing our ecosystems.
How could this happen?
How could the planet earth be faced with this seemingly unprecedented
challenge, a problem not necessarily amenable to technological solutions but
the common sense of man? Have we lost our human face and conscience? Has it
been digitized out of existence? American born British essayist, T. S. Eliot
(1888-1965) asks,
Where
is the life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in
knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? Then Eliot answers: The robot has stolen
it. Can we not steal it back?
Technology
is the new robotic religion of Nowhere Man, and it is clear that it is not
leading to man’s salvation. Technology from the beginning, but most notably in
the past 500 years, has cut and controlled the environment to the point of
exhaustion. The evidence is everywhere, but mainly at our doorstep.
Next: NOWHERE MAN – THREE! - RELENTLESS ESCAPE TO
"NOWHERE"!
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