Memory Lane

This morning I joined Humanists of Greater Portland (HGP) for one of their weekly in-person yet Zoom-friendly presentations.  They've had this ambitious speaker program going for years, and archive the talks unless the reader objects, much as ISEPP (Linus Pauling Memorial Lecture series) was wont to do.

Gus Frederick was the speaker and these blogs chronicle my attending of his presentations on several occasions.  He specializes on the history of Free Thought in Silverton, Oregon especially, and more specifically he tracks the life and times of Homer Davenport, a principal political cartoonist of the post Civil War Era.

HGP's emcee opened with some remarks about Memorial Day, which is tomorrow, saying this tradition began in these very post Civil War days, as people came together to honor their ancestors, and especially their prematurely killed during wartime.

Homer's life spanned the Spanish-American War and the American-Philippines War.  These two blended together as Parts 1 and 2 of the USA's manifest destiny chapter, which we see continuing up through the superpower chapter, with the Cold War and reshuffle.  William McKinley ran with Theodore Roosevelt as veep, but then was assassinated while in office.  

Homer, when working for Hearst, participated in anti-Roosevelt campaigning, but he later switched, coming up with his Good Enough for Me meme.  Uncle Sam had picked his prez, was the idea, and Roosevelt got elected.  Out of gratitude, Teddy helped Homer score authentic Arabian horses from Bedouins in Arabia, with Homer going to Syria like some swashbuckling Lawrence of Arabia.

Amazingly, Homer's mother already had premonitions about her child being the next Thomas Nast, a great cartoonist, and enlisted the help of a Free Thought doctor to give maximum advantage to this soon to be arriving genius.  She died only three years later, after getting everyone to promise they would shepherd Homer towards his destiny.  Everything worked out as planned apparently.

That reminds me, I woke up to YouTube telling me more about the influence of Arabic culture on Frank Herbert, author of Dune, as he developed the Fremen (also associated with Frank's experiences among Quileutes).  Oregonians tend to culturally appropriate Dune (because Frank was among the Oregon dunes when conceiving Dune), and why not?  But why not also appropriate / open channels with Arab culture through rural memes, including the raising of show horses.

Dune was a major topic of conversation yesterday, between Alexia and myself, over Thai food.  She really likes the David Lynch interpretation (movie).

Gus, likewise media-savvy, likes to make the link between the sheikh's horse, and TV star Mr. Ed.

In the blog post before this, here in BizMo Diaries, I advocate using Bucky Fuller's bio, his timeline, to help anchor a panoply of timelines. We could be doing a lot more around the timeline concept, is one of my Pirate Party planks. I'm for treating Homer Davenport's scenario they same way, as one of those Open Sesame scenarios that leads to a wealth of other partially overlapping scenarios (i.e. there's a Big World in there, a veritable circus).

How I'd tie the Homer and Bucky scenarios together is through world expos, the one in Chicago, where electricity made its debut, and the one in Oregon, the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition.  This thread twists around the Disney thread, and takes us into the aerospace sector (Tomorrow Land), as well as to global grids on Dymaxion Maps.

Unlocking 1900s American Literature

I seem to claim to be a Pragmatist, enough so that I'm allowed to aim the John Dewey, Richard Rorty vector through Bucky and onward. What gives me that right.  I don't know enough about Charles Sanders Peirce, for one thing, although I did go through an abduction phase.  We had that ISEPP lecture...

I'd argue with the premise though.  I'm not the authority, clearly, I'm just into putting beads on a memorable necklace of connected thinkers.  I do it for the benefit of my students, and I haven't said you have to be one of them.  That's your decision.  Lets be peers.

Make your own necklaces, just make sure (friendly advice) you don't completely leave out some important beads.  Like Newton (as in Isaac).  Have I left out important beads?  For sure!  Why it's important to keep finding more teachers.

David left some nice comments on this one (embedded YouTube).

Pigging Out on Melodrama

If one comes from the premise that humans adore lurid tabloid melodrama, then this must be heaven on earth.  As Henry Ford Sr. put it, famous for stumbling late into its study: "history is one damn thing after another" (with an emphasis on "damn" I'd add).  

Welcome to purgatory?  Or is that a euphemism?  

Either way, admit you love it.  Every day, another episode of As the World Turns.

Lofty intellectuals sometimes make scoffing noises regarding soaps, but then concoct their own special scandals, like the Bay of Pigs, or some other misguided display of derring-do.  They want their place in the history books too.

I recall my little exercise when still a newly minted high school teacher, fresh from Princeton, now at St. Dominic Academy for young women (however defined).  They were to a man (chuckle) General Hospital aficionados.  That was the leading soap du jour.  

I passed out 3x5 (5x8?) cards saying:  "think of a soap opera plot, either one you've seen, or make it up, but substitute fancy titles, cast nobles and royalty, and turn them in."  I read some choice examples.  We all found it good fun.  "Yep, that's history".

But of course history is more than just human soaps, or should be.  The boundaries are fuzzy.  We depend on geological time for our relatively fleeting chronologies.  

You don't get diamond mine soaps, or oil well frenzies, or gold rushes, without diamonds, oil or gold.  The relatively slow (superhumanly slow) and relatively fast (superhumanly fast) inform what goes on in the here and now (local scope).

In some of our literature, we connect more with these higher and lower frequencies, invisible to unaided senses, and paint our dramas accordingly.  

They're still dramas (scenarios) but they’re maybe not soaps in the usual sense, of attracting lots of attention to the embedded advertisements.  

The medio-sphere is characterized by commerce.  Commerce depends on phenomena outside the medio (media) sphere.  The soaps flow along in a middle-way channel that's comfortingly comprehensible, a trough, a place to pig out.

Tourists Touring

I was short on cash and don't usually carry checks, and they didn't take plastic, but next time I'll get my lifetime membership in the Portland Theosophical Society Library. I was introduced by another tenant in the building, a CPA.  They've left NW Portland for a Beaverton-Hillsdale address.

I've been using the car more (driving out to Beaverton), so my mood (mode) has turned more spatio-geographic, as befitting us drivers.  I'm seeing the neighborhoods again, and how they inter-connect. Cars run it all by us relatively quickly, through all the windows.  We become geo-spatially fluent, more like London taxi drivers.

Seeing Portland loom closer, coming from the south on I-5, is pretty melodramatic, through those Terwillager curves, under the cable car, and over the Marquam... 

 ...then stopped by a freight train (not a problem, I love trains)... 

On out Hawthorne to the hood (neighborhood); I'd been gone on and overnight (myself and the dog).

I'm interested in Global University circuitry that gives people valuable hands-on skills doing agriculture but without extracting a big commitment involuntarily. I've written about all this a lot.  

The lure of the rural lifestyle is what's meant to serve as self-recruiting. We're not cudgeled the unwilling into harvesting the eggplant crop or whatever.  However, as a for-credit activity towards a doctorate in farming, you might want to try doing some hands on in Oregon's legendary Willamette Valley (where the river flows north).  We even do wines, like in Italy.  And raise alpaca.

Actually the alpaca business is mostly over the Cascade range to the east, in the Oregon high desert area. Yet these neighborhoods are but hours apart by road (Santiam Pass), so it's really all one rural ecosystem, crisscrossed by various grades of road, and festooned with jeweled cities and towns (not literally, but like in Oz). I liked the Coburg area, what I saw of it, just off I-5 north of Eugene.

But do rural folk want to host (for a stipend) any temporary alien house guest visitors of a student exchange program nature?  They'd prefer actual ETs the way a lot of them talk.  There's no wish to impose, but if some agree, then you will see more tourists taking pictures and frequenting the watering holes.  Is this OK?  Oregon is worth seeing, via work-study, as a retiree or whatever.  

Tourists do want to come here.  The flip side of the bargain is Oregonians like seeing the world.

In sending Peace Corps everywhere else but here, North America, our good people were spared ever being visited by the idealistic young except for missionaries, e.g. the Hari Krishnas and Rajneeshis. We didn't get government sponsored emissaries (more like State Department types than died-in-the-wool Christians) coming to our shores, wishing to assist the "richest nation on Earth" become less pathological about poverty.  

That's a gross exaggeration of course (a one sided account).  We had programs like Vista that turned inward.  Even scouting has flirted with the idea of community service.  The religious tribes run hospital empires, praise Allah.  

The traffic patterns whereby the ideologies spread, has really been every which way (tourists from everywhere, going all over) for quite some time, as humans have become more kinetic (get around more) thanks to technology.  

Almost everyone into "futurism" (which by now sounds retro) is aware of this trend, and has been for decades (if old enough to remember).