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.
