NOWHERE MAN in NOWHERE LAND - TWO

  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 19^th 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 18^th 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 21^st 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 19^th 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 38^th 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"!