“The Treason of Involvement”
Joseph L. Mankewiecz did an update of Dickens in 1964, written by Rod Serling, more narrowly focused on the idea of global cooperation. A Carol for Another Christmas might be an odd choice for date night, I admit, but an old friend of my wife’s suggested it, and we had nothing else to do after our Friday night fish fry at McCoul’s downtown.
The Scrooge analog is Daniel Grudge, who’s just used his influence, behind the scenes, to cancel his local university’s international exchange program. They don’t use the word Fulbright, but that’s what they mean.
The Ghost of Christmas Past, a nameless GI with a harmonica, shows him the convoy of the dead.
Hundreds of ships. Thousands of ships. Loaded with boxes, chief. China, Ethiopia, Spain, Latvia, Hungary. Undeclared wars, police actions, some minor insurrections. All the way back, chief, all the way back — as far as anyone can remember — and still farther. But it all boils down to Somebody stopped talking . . . so they fought . . . so they bled . . . so they died.
and then takes him back to the ruins of Hiroshima.
It’s not subtle, not at all.
If you joined with other nations to vaccinate their children, how would that desecrate your flag?
That Serling fellow certainly had a way with words. What was your favorite line?
I wrote about my own Fulbright experience in India here.
It was that experience that changed my mind about Rotary. I won’t claim to be a leader within that worldwide movement, even locally, but I’m proud to be involved, to the minor extent that I am.
Ecology of Empire
Of course, we flatter ourselves to think that it’s all about us. A good series I saw on the Roku channel today called The Secrets to Civilization describes how distant climate events played into the rise and fall of previous civilizations around the Mediterranean, and the science of how we know that now. Another I watched earlier in the week followed novelist John Steinbeck and biologist Ed Ricketts into the Sea of Cortez in 1940, tracking how the cycle of El Niño and La Niña lead to the alternate bloomings of the desert above and the waters below. A couple of degrees difference in surface temperature is all it takes to bring the rains to land.
I went through a long Steinbeck phase as a kid, starting with The Red Pony and The Pearl, continuing with the longer stuff all through high school. I especially loved Cannery Row and to a lesser extent the sequel Sweet Thursday, though I don’t remember them very well now. I had no idea at the time that they were based on real people. Joseph Campbell, the mythologist, was one of them:
You remember the party in Cannery Row ? That was my birthday party. Even the flagpole sitter was actually there, They used to do that sort of thing back then.
Ricketts was at the center of the circle, according to everybody who’s written about it,
It was Ed who was especially important to me, because he re- enforced the interest in biology that I had had as a prep school student. And from our long talks about biology, I eventually came up with one of my basic viewpoints: that myth is a function of biology. It's a manifestation of the human imagination which is stirred by the energies of the organs of the body operating against one another. In other words, myth is as fundamental to us as our capacity to speak and think and dream.
but I have to believe that he (Ricketts) was also listening to and learning from these other bright people. His own writing was criticized as being too subjective, not scientific enough. Hanging out with novelists and poets will do that for you.
As a final factoid on the subject, when the boat from the Sea of Cortez, the Western Flyer, was found rotting away somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, a bunch of biologists set up a foundation to restore it. Where did they source the lumber for it? The sustainable forestry program at Berea College, in Kentucky, not that far from my parents’ farm. There’s a 12-minute video on Facebook.
I actually did that kind of small-scale logging as a kid, working with my dad and my brothers and our horse Silver. We didn’t saw the lumber ourselves, but we did peel the poplar logs for the poles in a barn we built. We also built my grandmother’s house, but that was later and might have been with “bought” lumber. At that point in time, I was more of a Luke Skywalker type, dreaming of far-off places rather than paying attention to what I was doing right then.
In some ways, I still am. Gotta get to the Farmer’s Curb Market for ingredients for a crockpot mushroom barley stew for my Shadowdark game this afternoon. The GM’s a vegan, and I don’t want to anger him and face his vegan wrath.
(The new Scott Pilgrim show is really fun, btw.)
In the car on the way to the market just now, NPR was all about the wars, and the President going around Congress to sell weapons, exactly the endless drumbeat of war Serling was satirizing, and that the crew of the Western Flyer wanted to get away from.