Musings on The Women’s March

Milt and Florence (Mashino) Storey, married in 1936 in The Middle of Nowhere. No martyrdom, no marching, no Machiavellian manipulation, and yet…

I know some of you are thinking I might be tone deaf with that caption here in March, Women’s History Month. I am not tone deaf. I’m actually pretty sensitive to tone, which, in the literal sense, I’d attribute to my other grandma, on my mom’s side, Dorothy (Mason) Barnett.

I guess it was both grandmas, through the pico-cultures they established, their extended families, that made me sensitive to another kind of tone, which has been the beating of drums, so to speak, and blaring brass, so to speak, that diminish a side of Women’s History that is barely honorably mentioned, so to speak. As a man, can I comment? I do/did hesitate to bring it up, but hey.

Full disclosure, I’m not usually particularly aware of whose month it is, because 1) I don’t watch the kind of programming/news where it gets mentioned and 2) the practice raises some conundrums in terms of recognition that I don’t think are necessarily benign. I might be in a small minority in this, but I’m not alone. (It isn’t a political thing, unless “Everything is political”, to which I’d have to say “Then political no longer has meaning.” But then we’d be here all day.)

The thing is, Grandma Storey’s birthday is on March 2nd (1917), and I had some awareness of Juno from Roman mythology, so I tied some things together for fun and wrote a different-perspective-piece. Then I was reminded that March is Women’s History Month. I decided a counterintuitive, to most, commentary might be useful, or something, because there’s a meta-implication in a lot of the normal-channel messaging this month.

When I was a high school teacher I realized that the message, and many of our well-meaning messages, had a dark or darkening side, you might say, and I want to acknowledge some of that. So I’m going delve into that this month. It’s a sort of synthesis of what I’ve just started touching on here and what I posted last week. I’ve modified last week’s post a little, which is below. I think both of my grandmothers would like to have seen this mentioned.

Beyond Pop Reverance and Women’s March

Grandma would have been 105 this past week, if she'd only have lived as long as we expected when she was 95. I'm guessing she missed the 1994 episode of The Simpsons that the overlords meme came from, when newscaster Kent Brockman mistook the enlarged appearance of an ant on the spacecraft video as an indication of malicious insectual alien intent. (The saying has apparently been misattributed to a related 1977 movie, but I don't digress.)

Kent not only announced, "I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords," as a way to presumably garner a better position than the average underground sugar cave worker he imagined in the near future; he offered his services for their takeover.

I played Kent, in a way, a couple of years ago at MatchBOX when I explained why women should have been running the world all along. I had decided that, besides the fact that only about one in fifty humans needs to be male in order to maintain the population, we men might function mostly as jesters and servants for the typical traditional women’s lives of childbearing and childrearing. Jesters, warriors, hunters, and lifters of heavy things.

We men are probably here to lighten the load, in various meanings, for the gender that naturally has to take life more seriously, generally, naturally, again, given their more direct function in producing, feeding, and caring for the young. Yes, yes, some responsibilities get shared, but that's in support of the mother, you could say. It's always in support of the mother. She is the natural, rightful, boss.

Then I went on to wonder, out loud, about if it made sense, now that we'd messed things up and let the males "take over" in various ways, for women to take back a world and a way that was mistakenly developed by men, of all people.

If it always should have been a woman-directed world in terms of economics and everything else, while the men played the jester, took orders and lifted heavy stuff or whatever, along with some occasional fertilizing of eggs, then it did not really make sense for women to simply assert themselves as equal humans, fully-capable-mere-functionaries, in a man-designed system. Right?

Toil away in a man-designed system instead of redesigning something better? Woman empowerment to simply fill more slots in poorly designed man-made system, that's a feminist's goal? There are better goals, it seemed.

So far so good, it went, my semi-public musing, until I also wondered out loud if what women needed was a man, like me, to lead their empowerment movements, at least in term of goals. I mentioned that maybe it should be called Timinism instead of feminism, to distinguish it from efforts to have women simply jump behind the wheel of a doomed societal bus, overpowered with turbo-charged nitro-injected engines, yes plural, as men had foolishly designed and worshipped.

As you might have suspected, somewhere along the line I lost my small audience, but I kept thinking about it. In so many cases (not all, I know!!!) it seems that the man is likely to be saying/doing goofy things more than the woman--and this made evolutionary sense, to me, maybe.

The woman, maybe, needed to, or tended to, based on neurotransmitters and their ties to deep personal experience, focus more on future well-being, for nearly everyone, while the man needed to just lighten the various loads she had. It was a hey-wait-a-minute moment, which is kind of like an aha moment, except it’s just something to explore without a conclusion necessarily.

These aren't things we need to make Shoulds out of, or legislation, or posters--they're just things to think about for some, perhaps, potential value on some level of understanding, maybe.

The Latest Poemification of Some Serious Related Stuff

Here’s the poem I explained at Motivate The Mind last Tuesday, and it ties in with all this. I’ll just put the poem here, but you might want to go back to that link for background if it seems interesting.

As I explained there, I had just started a cute little rhyming thing about the vernal equinox coming, but Allie and Stu took over and created something more serious. The only remnant of my unassuming little rhymes are in italics, kind of a token allowance I guess by Allie and Stu to let me feel like I contributed to their more serious musings.

It turned out to be kind of appropriate for that day, International Women's Day, except some of the points...point to certain mindsets that are, unfortunately, gender neutral in terms of what some might call unnecessary damage or pain for themselves and others in very different ways. That's Allie and Stu for you, blending a couple of different perspectives.

More Smiles, Serenity, and Satisfaction

Three…weeks before the Equinox

Two…until we move the clocks
ahead to, some say, save some time

I say to Juno, let it shine.

Let her light of wisdom win.
Let the light from Sun soak in,
and light the Selfish path some laid
that led to this abyss you’ve made.

Amiss, you valorized a way
of Want and Grasp and Seize the Day
for what you’re “owed,” but what bestowed
a right to harvests that erode?
Erode the soil of loving bonds.
A river grows and flows, absconds
away with meanings more than More
or “I will seek what I adore.”

But Juno brings a light to show
where More of any type will go.
From Left and Right the paths poured in.
The Bliss Abyss, the dins deafen.

The squawking birds, the broadcasts, shrill
“Do not suggest I curb my Will.
My will’s divine, I think you’ll find,
if not, these books should change your mind.”

Your mind? Your books? The grind, the crooks,
they block the light—they dangle hooks.
From Left and Right the paths poured in.
The Bliss Abyss, the dins deafen.

And as dim light lights up the sky
The Flow’s delights might catch your eye.
A lure, alluring, but no real use.
Perhaps you’ll bite and get set loose.

But barbs, on hooks, that lure you took,
they leave a gash. You didn’t look.
Some light was there, you didn’t care.
Your sight lost to delight’s bright snare.

But Juno brings more light today,
a goddess in that Roman way
of stories meant to ready minds
to find the fruit within the rinds.

Will mothers stand and ease the fray?
Once smothered under the Selfish Way.
The paths of More from Right and Left,
the Me & Now of might, bereft
of understanding…satisfaction…
down the road…not gut reaction.

Have others smothered mothers’ sight?
Will you recover with Juno’s light?
Will sunlight raise the daffodils
from trampled soil and paths of ills
proposed as ways that “pay the bills”?
You know the shells. Do you know the shills?

Or will you acquiesce again,
or argue over Original Sin,
as if the question matters when
you’ve seen the tears, where these paths end.

Three weeks before the Equinox,
Daffodils, tulips, daisies, phlox…

The lures, now bright with hooks that show,
the crooks and crimes that bring you woe.
The warm sunlight makes flowers grow
embrace the light wise mothers know.

Allie and Stu


Okay, well that's a lot to think about, but fitting for this season of beginnings. We could probably talk about that all day. But not today.



And Another Hey-Wait-A-Minute Moment

Diverging from what's above, and really along another vein, sometimes in my reflecting on the many many stories I've always heard about strong, capable, intelligent, insightful women with broadly known reputations makes me wonder why they still get so much airplay, as if they're exceptions, or as if we're not aware, and as if the ubiquitous mothering, nurturing, and uncountable contributions don’t really…count (and that seems suspiciously Stralfian, Stu and Allie would say, because what is the message about those subtler ambitions?).

Some will say the narrow emphasis is because of persistent inequitable compensation, low occupational or managerial representation, dismissive attitudes, etc., so the endless and well-meaning Did-you-know? campaigns are meant as a countermeasure. I'm not sure it makes sense though.

It's a little like how PBS seems to believe we're not aware of the non-European contributions to science, literature, philosophy, medicine, etc. Sure, the cultures that modernized (we'll come back to that term) modern society, and post-modernized postmodern society, were mostly white males with European backgrounds.

The sociology, psychology, and statistical probability behind how that happened, and how most things happen in a particular circumstance earlier or more often than in another, would be more than a mere digression here. But even common-sense perspectives (life experience combined with free-range reflection) would suggest that likelihood of notable innovation or culture-wide innovation/expansion increases with concentration of related activities and focus, which was, which happened to be, inequitably, in a particular general geographic area among individuals with the available time to do it, by whatever multi-level factors had been in play for however long. The same people also wrote very long sentences very frequently, unlike my infrequent transgressions.

Certain cultures have tended to be more steady-state than others, right? These are sometimes called traditional cultures. Do we call the one that creates a lot of carcinogens and endocrine disrupters as well as creating a few mitigating antidotes more desirable than the steady-staters? It depends. But it's not clear that we should. There are advantages to both. (Weapons come in handy sometimes, because there are crazy people all over the place at various levels and scales of endangerment, as we’re being reminded recently.)

Is the culture better that herds everyone and their kids into a fossil-fuel-burning car, then to a (unsightly, intrusive, disfiguring, environmentally expensive) wind-turbine-powered car, while they're distracted from wholistic life by exploitative least-common-denominator sexual advertisement, entertainment, and release--and incentivized pursuit of more kinds of More than our happiness-pursuing forefathers and (I assume) foremothers ever imagined? Apparently yes, given the apparently preferred manifestations of empowerment I see...everywhere.

What would we have ever done without the magical and universally licensing word empowerment? What better word is there for helping herd more and more people into the fray of Want and Get, currently with more psycho-biodiversity than Ferngully or Pandora, now that virtual virtuosity has let us presumably shed the shackles of reality, relationships, and actual bodies with actual emotional connectedness and fleshly outcomes (including a legacy/future).

And I'm probably not the only one who wonders if maybe want should now start with wh not w, whant, with a very delicately staccato t sound, to make it a little more sensual, and desire should be desiiiire, like Tim Curry might have done as Hexxus in Ferngully. (I just finished The Overstory, so maybe the life force woven in the pages jumped into the narrator and through my ear buds…)

Summing This Up, Seriously, In a Way

I’ve had two seemingly great pre-production meetings on This Project, or The 7th Pie, the past few weeks. By pre-production meetings I mean discussions of core ideas and plans for putting this project right in the Stralfs’ faces. No one got mad or rolled their eyes, and I settle for that as confirmation of the themes involved, which ultimately reflect Stu and Allie’s 7th Pie Theory. I’ve never needed much for confirmation, so the past two weeks have provided plenty. Onward.

And I’ve never been a rebel, and I’ve never been for burning it all down or even talking about that. I’ve tended to be more of a balloon flight escapist, not that I don’t love working on the ground. Recently I’ve referred to the hot air balloon view as the sweet spot of perspective, and that’s what all the musing and mulling above was about.

Hey-wait-a-minute moments tend to come during hot air balloon expeditions, physical or imaginary. Sometimes its kind of like a ride in a pontoon plane like my parents and I took over southern Ontario where we fished, near where the road north ends. Pristine boreal forest on the shorelines, clearcut “bear pastures” behind them. We didn’t know.

It’s good to get off the ground, but you need to brace yourself sometimes, because things come into view that you might not have considered as a possibility. Sometimes it’s just a matter of having, or taking, the time to wonder and investigate for the heck of it, with no agenda at all.

If you go too high you can just make up whatever stories you want to about what’s happening on the ground. If you stay on the ground, you can get pre-occupied with proximal problems, pains, and pleasures. I feel like we’ve tended to focus on these two perspectives too much, but I’m not going to harp on that. Maybe this is more of an And thing than an either/or thing, like the kids say sometimes.

Anyway...to close

This past week would have been Juno’s Matronalia celebration a couple thousand years ago, as I wrote about last Tuesday here and at Motivate the Mind. Wednesday would have been Grandma’s birthday celebration. She joined Milt, and that joined up two farms in Ade Country, on the southern edges of the Beaver Lake Marsh. And that is where my own hot air balloon ride began and where I saw the beginnings of something I didn’t have a name for, which was actually The 7th Pie, according to Stu. More soon.

Thanks for reading. Have a great week.

Tim

Third-Way-ism Progressivism

We’re talking about how Small Is Beautiful here, and the beautiful and huge setting of the National Arts and Crafts Conference at the (Omni) Grove Park Inn perfectly illustrates the many meanings of many things, including Third Ways : ).

The Misconceptions of Democracies, Progressivism, Traditionalism, Third Ways, and Pie

(7 minute read time)

As much as we talk about the importance of non-binary thinking, almost everything reduces down to a yes/no at what you might call the bit level, very much like this image is made. At some point there will be an action required, which means there’s the choice of taking the action or not, which means it’s binary. Even adding a third choice doesn’t make it non-binary, it just raises us up one level from where a binary choice is still ultimately made.

(Please don’t go yet!)

The concept and concentration on binary modes gets reinforced in a democracy, so-called self-governance (except the selves don’t understand the who/how of persuasion and management of perspective), as the micro-scale-truth of binary bits re-emerges as an artificial and distorting contrivance of Red and Blue (and no green, for the real picture, if you know what I mean).

It’s ironic to me that democracy itself, especially in the form we’ve generally used, encourages an oversimplification of realities in so many ways, because that is how crowds are moved. This is a cost of democracy that we can accept, except we need to remind ourselves often that “real reality”, when it comes to how life is actually conducted and experienced and left as precedent and pattern for the next generations, is not really being included in the nutshells of pop political presentations.

And unfortunately, with our inherited fixation on freedom and fashion-dictated f-words on all levels of comprehensive human flourishing, we forget that we’re only considering a small fraction of reality and certainly not the future. A philosophical approach that doesn’t ground itself in future human flourishing, on the ground that is, is eff’d up, in all likelihood. This is partly where Bug Stu, I assume, gets his ideas about the Stralfs implementing a Plan F —for getting us to leave Earth.

Here’s something weirder than small misanthropic aliens trying to mumble us into immigrating to their planet. I think one of the heroes in Stu’s story is going to counter the Stralfs by leapfrogging way ahead to a Plan Z. And Z is for Zen. That’s the weird part. It might also strike you as weird that I don’t seem to have touched on the title yet. It’s not that I’m rebelling against a tyranny of titles or something. I am not a rebel. I am also not a particular fan of philosophy in general nor exotic mental frameworks from faraway places, I mean as a novel fascination. I’m not a fan, but that doesn’t mean I ignore useful ideas.

Another weird thing is that I got to this, whatever it is, through my own brain science fixation combined with other explorations in thought, other frameworks, some Arts and Crafts sensibilities and social observations, and weirdest of all, watching a 1983 documentary about Teddy Roosevelt over the weekend. Isn’t that weird? And now I’m also thinking of Teddy Ruxpin like some of you are. That’s not weird, in a way.

We brought in Teddy Ruxpin to help out right at the start in our family, like many of your parents did. Eventually his lower jaw fell off, but we discovered that some plastic springy Dracula teeth could be jammed in there and sort of look like they belonged there, except for how Teddy’s typical subjects, songs, and tone contrasted with his new look. The kids were old enough to see the humor not the horror, I think. I like to believe it might have taught them how to improvise and to not judge from appearances too much.

And that’s a good segue back to Teddy Roosevelt and maybe eventually to the title. Teddy bears originated from an account of Teddy Roosevelt, as many people know, when he refused to shoot a bear that had been deliberately put in place for “hunting.” TR was all for hunting all kinds of game, but he did it in a semi-natural state of “hunter” and “prey”.

I don’t know that TR was a model human or president, that’s not the point. Maybe he was, or maybe certain things just squared well with a shared side of human-ness that we’ve come to understand better recently, all taken with a grain of salt or no salt, but something to consider. I guess you could say it has to do with The Enlightenment’s illusion of understanding how the human mind works or should, in the estimation of its leaders.

The label of progress or progressivism has always bothered me. It’s like how I’m bothered when I hear people say, “Some people are just afraid of change.” That’s much too simplistic. It’s dismissively simplistic. And it’s also hard to take the concept of Progressive out of our current political contexts, which I’m guessing have many of the readers here mentally squirming a bit already in defensiveness or vague discomfort about impending conflict here in this very moment.

On top of that our natures, and our two-party politics (not sure there’s a sustainable option to that, long term), tend to have us inferring that any proposal is a “this way not that way” proposition to everyone, everywhere, all-the-time, even if it’s claimed otherwise, because that’s how social revolution or counter-revolution is implemented, and the social revolution from the 60’s is still underway, in a way, in spite of bashing the Boomers, where it all began.

Maybe there are a thousand Third Ways, which is why I refer to Third-Way-ism and not a Third Way. And way-back-when I started saying that “Everything is pie,” meaning that the depth and complexity of even small elements of reality is too complicated for the typical two-dimensional representations we receive and use. This point isn’t about judgment of others, it’s about understanding whatever the thing is we’re worrying about and talking about. (Pie also stands for pretty interesting explorations.)

The kind of Progressivism I’m interested in requires a lot of Pie, and a lot of Third-Way-ism. And there’s this Zen thing in it, which cannot be simplified to Westernized hacking and curated appropriation of Eastern philosophy, as it often has been, or used as a shell for justifying a lack of our attention, because the future of our kids’ probably doesn’t care about our protective shells of justified inattention very much.

What I’m interested in is also not a sort of non-spiritual spirituality, which seem to get used as a way to avoid the ickiness of fashion-conscious metaphysical fascination while still garnering the impression of personal depth, worldliness of some sort, and whatever is the current zeitgeist of skepticism. Instead this is kind of what we get when Bug Stu looks at the small stuff and Allie looks at things from way way up in the sky.

And truly metaphysical assumptions, beliefs, still remain intact, partly because they’re pretty pliable once you dig deep, not that they’re all saying the same thing, and it’s okay that the derived do’s and dont’s end up on a different level from where the deepest digging takes us.

Conflicts between any two realms can be created, but that is usually the only way they appear, by creating the conflicts, which probably means there’s another element of that particular Pie of a conversation to understand, whether it’s inside our own heads or shared with another. It seems like we can find either conflicts or connections, depending on what we want to find or are told to expect. Most of the origin stories for Eastern and Western philosophy sound kinda sketchy, of course, but how would you suggest one would express a complete and accurate story of the origin of thought and thoughts?

It’s like the origin stories often seem to be made for kids of some form, then the metaphorical young teenagers with a presumptuous Enlightenment attitude come along, then the angsty young adults appear as Romanticists and Reformers, then they go off into the wilderness (fighting all kinds of mental and physical battles there) throughout most of the postmodern twentieth century, then they return and wonder how they ever thought they knew so much and could prescribe solutions so confidently.

This is where I see us moving now, maybe, and it’s a good step. And the first crack in the cognitive shell we were sold in the 60’s and 70’s is probably going to be about our selves. That one was easy to sell and easy to sell to in terms of materials goods and philosophical rationalizing. True complexity and comprehensiveness comprise many peddlers’ recurring worst nightmare, until they figure out it works better for us all, even them despite reduced incomes or career changes.

Just thinking. Thanks for reading.

Tim

A Peaceful Place Beside the Ratti Race

The Omni Grove Park Inn in Asheville. Built in 1913. A surprisingly large part of our story is rooted here.

Rugged opulence, moneyed occupants, and funny, ironic, Soil inoculants

Until I’m better supervised I’ll probably keep throwing in weird words at the wrong time and blaming it on my friend, Bug Stu. I have tried paying people to supervise me, but the tension between Bug Stu’s vision and my desire to be liked (or something?) has still made it difficult to walk the fine line between appeal and philosophical coherence, financial interest and introspection, and progressivism and conservatism, in all meanings of every word. I blame Stu.

This weekend the two of us are headed back to Asheville for the 35th National Arts and Crafts Conference, which centers around a period and aesthetics, maybe even a set of ethics, that are pleasantly similar in both origins and anticipated resolution to our own. By resolution I don’t mean a complete resolving of the growing din of competing choruses, political/philosophical, economic/ergonomic, hedonic/eudaimonic, etc.

That is, I don’t mean that I, or Stu, see some panacea or Utopian model as a way to resolve the din into a pan-pleasurable alternative of enlightened reformations, not even along the lines of the historic Arts and Crafts movement of the early 20th century—the focus of this conference. What we see, and I also have to credit Stu’s friend Allie Space-Owl in this, is an emerging 7th Pie Peace, or Piece, which the two of them started talking about around one hundred years ago.

So back to the title. If we assume that the economy, and therefore society sort of, has been made up of six different pies for the last hundred years or more, then the seventh pie could exist right beside the conventional six as a respectable and regenerative respite for any ratti racer. It could even provide a long, self-sustained, and alternatively productive sabbatical—or longer term lifestyle shift. That is, the seventh pie could provide a getaway or a gotaway. It could be a short stay, a Plan B, or even Plan A.

Physical contexts and mental contexts have mutual effects. And to assume our dins of prognoses and prescriptions, amplified by political ambitions and self-serving pseudo-sincere cheerleading, are not conducted mostly by those contexts, make me assume we’re not trying as hard as we could to understand things.

Sure, last weekend we had our reasons to prefer the Bengals over the Rams, or vice versa, or to eschew the whole sportsing machine; but to settle for similarly shallow or shallow-ing side-taking, or willful/unwitting ignorance of the effects of contexts on personalities, personal goals, personal pains, political games, political pawns, and so on, is generational negligence. That’s because we’ll leave a legacy for the next generation to struggle with, just as we six have (GI Generation through Gen Z—about one hundred years).

That’s getting a little too serious, so let me close by returning to the beginning and attempting a resolution of my own post here. Rugged Opulence…Soil Inoculants refers to both the origins of Grove Park Inn and the historic Arts and Crafts movement, throwing in a little metaphorical agronomy at the end, which relates to human flourishing and emergent understandings of enjoyment and satisfaction, not that science understands all.

But both literal and figurative understandings of soil, from which seeds grow or don’t, and in which plants or ideas and feelings emerge or don’t, or thrive or don’t, seem to have a lot more to do with how things are than our inherited twentieth-century mechanistic mental models prepared us for. Ultimately the soil contributes to whatever fruit we produce and can put in a pie for the next generations, so we cannot ignore soil’s anatomical and wholistic contributions.

Much progress has been made in understanding all kinds of soil in the last twenty years, thanks largely to complexity science, not just functional MRI machines. Yet our politics and economic prescriptions are built from 50- to 100-year-old mental models, with antiquated paradigms of what progress is, the same ideas they wrestled with at the end of World War I in the contexts of their times, and this is one reason I love going to the conference.

I believe this is all pointing to the importance of a 7th Pie, just like Stu and Allie thought one hundred years ago. It wouldn’t be for everyone, everywhere, all-the-time, but its 14% contribution to the economic culture might be part of the resolution we need. “14% is huge,” Stu often says, but I’ll let him explain that another time. (It’s not something someone needs to do for us.)

So much for my attempt at a resolution of this post. If that didn’t feel like a resolving of the din and dissonances I might have introduced above, maybe this song will. It’s one of my favorite examples of a semi-resolved cacophony, from the Talking Heads’ Fear of Music album, with multiple-level eerily fitting lyrics for all this and an especially fitting title for this weekend, relating to why I’ll probably post each day, at least, during the conference.

Memories Can’t Wait. (Lyrics on screen, some fitting imagery, some clashing, so it goes.)

Thanks for reading : ).

Tim

What’s So Funny ‘Bout Peace, Love, and Not Understanding?

Even these terms divide us, so we have to go deeper, if we dare—for the kids’ kids. Sketch by Bria of Antarctica

(7 minute read time—plus the two songs are worthy)

Okay…

To give credit where credit is due, and to tie this to Bug Stu, The coleoptera without a cause but not without a reason, here’s a newer video of Elvis Costello’s/Nick Lowe’s 1979 song. What a way to kick this off. A fun and conflicted song, to say the least. If you’re a long-time fan of Bug Stu (that sounds kinda funny, I know), your eyes might quake at the prominent “1914” shown after 53 seconds. Blinking might even become an unwanted impulse by micro-minutely obscurring the WWI theme as the graphics becomes clear, mixed with the Sixties-era simplistic slogan (is there another kind?) about making love not war, whatever that meant, or is. The Sixties were the beginning of the Fifty Year Fit we’re still in, but it was started, indirectly, by the earlier fit, fifty years before that.

And in listening to that song, my mind goes back to when our son Brandon was born (February 9th, 1985), when we lived in a minimalist little apartment in Morocco, Indiana, home of Where it All Began, according to Stu. Of course, Stu would be referring to the Stralfs landing there, but I’m only talking about my having returned from Nashville to do this, as in, do my on/off grown-up life.

So it is with these slightly weepy fingers that I type here while that song plays, reminding me of our little silver JVC jambox on the linoleum floor, doing its best to blare out Elvis Costello from one side of the cassette tape and Talking Heads from the other, over and over again. Minimalist, like I said. Were those the days? Young Tim and Jeanne and little Brandon and knowing exactly what we were supposed to be doing, because we had a new baby, and we were parents, and so on. Anyway, that song says a lot about The Pie, with and without those particular days from the days.

Yes. Anyway…

Fans of Bug Stu will probably remember that 1914 was the beginning of the Stralfs’ Hundred Year Plan, intended to result in our voluntary emigration to their (secretly crappy) planet, and they would replace us here. Only Stu and a few others know how I feel irrationally connected that Great War, which the U.S. entered in 1917.

The source of the irrational connection is that almost thirty years after the sweet and existentially secure jambox-on-the-floor days above, I had become involved in architectural restoration and preservation, for slightly different reasons than most people maybe. That’s too much to go into deeply, but it did result in my being invited to look over the wonderful Old Soldiers Home in Marion, Indiana, just before it was demolished. It had been a national treasure at one time, a tourist attraction even, built for Civil War veterans around 1890.

My crashed hard drive is clinging to the pictures I’d like to show you, sigh. Maybe someday. I’m confident they were the last pictures taken inside of that magnificent place. Due to the scale and nature of WWI battles, it had been transitioned from the original 300-acre self-sufficient collection of workshops, orchards, farm fields, dormitories, and beautiful large dining halls to a sprawling hospital and psychiatric center for the returning veterans. Maybe you had to be there, at the Old Soldiers Home, even if it was almost 100 years after the war. You could feel the pain and the slide from honor to tragedy to erasure on the personal, institutional, and architectural levels.

WWI meant the intended honor and bittersweet charm disappeared from the 1890 complex. Over time, even the most spectacular and ornate windows were covered with heavy woven wire. Somewhere I still have an old 4’ x 8’ chain link panel as was used for covering the hundreds of huge windows. Somewhere I have a picture of about 20 names scrawled on a wall, under something like, “We were the last people living in Building XXX,” probably written there twenty years before I visited.

A Twist Here

U.S. involvement in that war wasn’t necessarily a given, not to say whether we should or should not have been involved. There’s something bigger here though. So this, The Pie, is about a lot of things, including how a lack of caring, or confidence, or attention, about our minds, results in our misunderstanding our influences even today, or especially today, and those influences are how we understand ourselves, which is kinda meta in more ways than one. It doesn’t even have to rise to the level of spiritual.

But meta matters, especially for our kids and theirs, when that’s the biggest influence on the understandings we pass along, which is the biggest influence on whether they live well and happily or not. Our eyes need to be wide open so that they have a better start than we did on understanding ourselves —how things work on us and in us. (It’s not creepy, and it’s not creepy to care about this.)

The push for U.S. involvement in WWI was the first sophisticated use of crowd manipulation through Freudian insights. Sure, influencing crowds is nothing new, and it wasn’t back then either. But like a lot of things that are “nothing new”, it doesn’t mean scale, effectiveness, and impact aren’t. Sometimes we get so much better at things that they’re essentially new factors in society. Was the automobile really new?

We had wheels, gears, and engines of one sort or another, powered locomotion, long before we had cars. The arrangement and scale were different. And influential communication, commercialization, and manipulation weren’t new in the 1910’s, but the arrangement and scale was becoming different. The same sorts of manipulative techniques developed would soon be used to change minds on all sorts of subjects, for better and worse, built on an illusion of individual autonomy, built on the illusion that control would be obvious and complete, when it’s more about suggestibility and social psychology.

The techniques, based on Freud, came from reflecting on past crowd responses and developing more accurate mental models of our motivations. The better we’ve become in understanding both accuracy and models means the better we’ve been able to sell others products, experiences, and ideas, and emotions. Once we got on this path, we never looked back. We should have looked back. Our legacy could still be one of having looked back, even if with the qualifier of “Finally.”

A Twist There

Looking back, especially these days, can be an either defensive or offensive endeavor. It can be construed to be challenging or at least qualifying Right/Left-approved narratives. Looking back and not finding a villain or two, either in the physical or philosophical senses, would imply that a new script is needed, so to speak in our societal conversations. It would also attract a range of scholarly commentators, mostly disagreeing but magically still conveying the impression that they actually know.

So, I’m taking my friend Stu’s advice: When in doubt, call a Stralf out. Stralfs serve as a metaphorical villain, and we’ve shown that we’ll take what we can get, so that should be okay. And actually, due to the complexities, nuance, and aforementioned disagreement by scholars, maybe this is a reasonably accurate way to look at us humans and recent history, at least. Are we getting the complete story from somewhere now? Well, this might have better chance of being a complete story, right?

Oh, And…Bugs Like Music

At least according to Stu. So today, here at this first entry in this blog, on the first of February, in an effort that I think might go better than the first time I tried this, which was the first year of the Pandie, we’re referring to two special ridiculously relevant songs, Stu and I. First was the Elvis Costello/Nick Lowe song up there at the beginning (lyrics shown at that link), that you probably want to hear again. Could a song about the absence of peace, love, and understanding be any peppier? That’s how E.C. often rolled, as the kids used to say.

The second song, for which you probably saw a hint in the header, by another great songwriter you’ll see here often, is Caring Is Creepy, by The Shins (lyrics shown). Of course, caring is not creepy, neither is preparing to go a little meta and metacognitive and repairing the legacy we’ve inherited before we pass it on, which is for the kids and grandkids. (In this Age of Narcissistic Narratives, it might be necessary to remind ourselves that our legacy is not for us, but for them, never mind the Boomer b.s. We’ll be dust, right?)

This does all get complicated at times, and kind of out there. Simple answers might exist, but not simple and complete answers. So this can get kind of expansive. It’s also about caring in various meanings of that word, so it can be strangely cozy at the same time even though there’s reach. As I’ve mentioned before, the expression cozily expansive was created for this very thing. Maybe it was from Bug Stu. It takes a certain amount of security at times, as some iconic ideas often start looking a little different when sharing the right kind of dim light. So that’s what we’ll try to do.

Thanks for reading.

Tim