Give Peace A Chance

Throughout mankind, symbols have represented ideas, natural objects and feelings. Man used symbols in our first attempts to visually communicate - pictographs led to petroglyphs led to hieroglyphs led to alphabets.

Certain symbols change over time, none as drastically as the swastika. This infamous ideogram dates back a millennia over many cultures. In Hinduism it represented good luck, in Buddhism it's incorporated into the image of Buddha's foot. Seen in several Native American cultures, the swastika has a different meaning depending on the tribe. But none of them have negative connotations. So ubiquitous, the swastika can be seen as an example of man's collective unconscious. Obviously that changed after adopted by the Nazi party in the 1930s.

One of the most iconic symbols of my lifetime is the peace sign. I read somewhere that philosopher, activist Bertrand Russell was responsible for proliferation of the peace sign. That may be true, but he did not create it. That credit goes to a British graphic artist, Gerald Holtom. He came up with the idea for a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament protest in 1958 in the UK.

The design comes from semaphore, the system of communicating across distances, usually at sea, by using flags in a set formation representing each letter. Using the semaphore for N (nuclear) and D (disarmament), he encased them in a circle.

One facet of what created the turbulent 60s was protest against the Vietnam War. Those protests expanded the meaning of the peace sign to a symbol against all war, not just nuclear arms. So embraced by the counterculture, its use mushroomed. Like Topsy in Uncle Tom's Cabin, peace sign fashion and jewelry just growed up.

American businessmen being American businessmen, several tried to copyright the peace sign in the early 1970s. The courts decided that the symbol was universal and denied a copyright. Despite having lined the pocket of many a merchandiser, the peace sign still belongs to us all.

Despite the curmudgeonliness of old age and my natural aversion to popular culture, I still embrace the denotations and connotations of this symbol. Seriously, what's so funny 'bout peace, love and understanding? As ever - BB

"As I walk through this wicked world
Searchin' for light in the darkness of insanity..." Nick Lowe Peace, Love & Understanding

Snuff Said

Spinning through the dials on the ol'tube the other night, I came across the 1934 Leslie Howard film, The Scarlet Pimpernel. Howard played that "damned elusive pimpernel." I remember this movie from my youth. It led me to the book by Baroness Orczy which led me to a different Reign of Terror novel, the Dickens' classic, A Tale of Two Cities. 

Like another of my childhood heroes, Zorro, the Scarlet Pimpernel was a tough guy posing as a fop. In the 18th century, fops were so macaroni. 

Ah digression....I'm sure you all know the lyrics to Yankee Doodle. When Yankee Doodle sticks the feather in his cap and calls it macaroni, he was declaring a statement of elegant style. In England in the 1700s, macaroni meant the height of fashion. Of course the song originally was sarcastically sung by the British troops lambasting the colonials as backward bumpkins. Americans being Americans took up the song as a rallying cry. 

Back to the pimpernel (which by the way is a flower) - during his masquerade, Sir Percy Blakeney accentuates his foppish facade by elegantly sniffing snuff wiping way the excess and awaiting the possible sneeze with a lace handkerchief. Watching that scene again, I wondered what ever came of snuff.

This dry, powdered form of tobacco, wide spread in pre-Columbian America, was introduced to Europe by the Spanish. A French minister, Jean Nicot (from whom we get nicotine) brought it to France. There it seemed to "cure" the queen's migraines and became the rage of the upper classes. 

As the tobacco craze grew, smoking was seen as low class. While snuff came to be de rigueur for the nobility. Various flavors, ornate storage vessels and other assorted paraphernalia sprung from snuff's usage. Another industry created by the habit was handkerchiefs. No gentleman worth his snuff would be seen without a hanky. 

Time marched on. As Enlightenment philosophers expounded on equality, the aura of nobility waned. With that came the decline in snuff's popularity, and the rise in tobacco smoking. 

Now a fact that I find fascinating. Early on the popular version of snuff was the dry variety. There was a lesser known moist snuff. This hovered around the edges of tobacco usage. Over a century after the decline of dry snuff, moist snuff's usage began to increase. Known as dipping, just a pinch between the cheek and gum, gave the user a hands-free nicotine fix. 

Yes, ironically the habit originally taken up by the upper crust is now embraced by the working class. This Marxian revolution in smokeless tobacco tickles me to no end. We are truly a crazy species. As ever BB

“Looks like what drives me crazy
Don't have no effect on you--
But I'm gonna keep on at it
Till it drives you crazy, too.”  - Langston Hughes

Spores of Creativity

The topic of this musing is the fecundity of literary talent that coalesced during 1960-62 in the Wallace Stegner Fellowship for creative writing at Sanford University.  The writers who met there are a literary who's who. Just a partial list: Larry McMurtry, Ken Kesey,
Robert Stone, Gurney Norman, Ed McClanahan and Ken Babbs. Born before the war and coming of age in the Fifties, they stand like a cultural colossus striding two generations, yet not really a part of either. Kesey had said, "We were too young to be Beats, but too old to be Hippies."

The wave that the Beat Generation rode from the end of World War II had broken. Several swells stirred the next cultural wave. One of those started in a small, academic neighborhood on Perry Lane in Palo Alto, CA. What a strange alchemical mixture of talent, personality and cultural metamorphosis! A serendipitous catalyst sprang from Stanford's Psychology department's experiments with psychoactive chemicals. Allen Ginsburg told Kesey that the US Government was behind this. Later, the Freedom of Information Act proved Ginsburg correct. It was part of the CIA's MK-ULTRA project.

Vic Lovell, a Psychology graduate student, suggested to Ken Kesey, supporting a wife and children on his meager stipend, that he could make $75 a session testing these substances. Another erstwhile volunteer for these experiments was Grateful Dead lyricist, Robert Hunter. Like the evils of the world issuing forth from Pandora's box, the government's chemical secret begat the Acid Tests which begat psychedelic music, the Family Dog, the Fillmore, all of which came to define the Sixties.

I recommend reading anything from the above authors. These are a few of their works that began germination in the fellowship writing sessions:
Horseman, Pass By - McMurtry's first novel made into the Paul Newman movie, HUD
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Kesey's first novel, became a play starring Kirk Douglas in 1963 and later a movie
Hall of Mirrors - Stone's first novel made into the movie, WUSA
Divine Right's Trip - Norman's first novel originally released printed in the margins of Stewart Brand's The Last Whole Earth Catalog
The Natural Man - McClanahan's first novel originally conceived in 1961, but not published until 1983
Who Shot the Water Buffalo - Babb's first novel which he worked on after coming home from Vietnam just in time to be part of the 1964 Furthur Bus Trip. During the Acid Test Days, he lost his only manuscript. Years later, an old friend found the manuscript in a box. It was finally published in 2011.

Like a psychic Rubik's cube, during certain periods in history with the right social and cultural setting, special people align to create an era that focuses its energies into a magical, creative melange. The Belle Epoque in Paris in the late 1800s, the Harlem Renaissance in New York City from the end of World War I to the mid-30s, the Beats in New York City and San Francisco from the late 40's through the 50s were such periods.

The Bay Area near and around San Francisco during the early to mid 60s was one of those. By the late 60s, our mass-market culture had squeezed much of the creative juice from that forbidden fruit. Hopefully, like ballistospores from fruiting fungi, creative flashes have forcibly shot into the universe nestling into the crania of unsuspecting young minds. Will the circle be unbroken? As ever - BB

"To Vik Lovell, who told me dragons did not exist, then led me to their lairs." Ken Kesey's dedication of One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest