Clarity on Memetics #1

Why do we humans inherit and pass along ideas and other memes that are not actually good for us or the society we live in? 

To appreciate the way in which socially replicable phenomena (besides market inequities) need not be functioning only for the sake of the humans who reproduce them, one need only consider such things as dogma, clichés, superstitions, scientific and artistic ruts, bureaucratic formalities, feuds, and war. At times we all reproduce these things despite our best interests. There is a real pressure to do so in order to maximize the local fitness or effectiveness of our own social interactions: we are more or less bound to pursue our most immediate ends by immediately available means.

My encounters with Wavy Gravy, Counter-Culture Clown and Psychedelic Relic.

For any counter-culture relics out there, I can quickly contextualize my experience at Desiderata Community School by pointing out that Wavy Gravy was our first commencement speaker.  If you are an old hippie like me, you will remember him as the guy in the Woodstock movie who was helping people on bad acid trips to get grounded in some good karma. His was the voice announcing over the loud speaker, "Don't take the Brown Acid. The Brown Acid is bad acid."

Hugh Romney, alias Wavy Gravy, was a friend of the school. He came to Sacramento from the Hog Farm commune in Berkeley to give a commencement address at our first big graduation ceremony. Yes, he brought green plastic garbage cans, and one of them contained freshly made electric Kool-Aid. Yes, I said electric, but Wavy never said it. Everyone thought it had LSD in it, but the trips people had might have been a party-wide placebo effect, since everyone knew that Wavy had provided the LSD-laced Kool-Aid for the infamous Acid Tests of the Merry Pranksters. Another green plastic garbage pail contained small toys, make-up, wigs, hats, noisemakers, bubble juice and bubble wands. Soon the air was filled with large shining globes of soapy surface tension, refracting light, making brief rainbows that floated on the spring breeze and popped into other dimensions. In other words, the atmosphere was very conducive to psychosomatic psychedelic visuals.

    The graduation ceremony took place at the home of the richest kid who had ever attended Desiderata. He dressed like a cowboy and hadn’t been a student there long, so I was not expecting his parents to be quite so wealthy. Since our tuition was on a sliding scale according to income, this family was a major contributor to the cause. At first, the group of about 25 hippies who descended on the mansion’s back yard felt restrained in such an upscale environment. Enter Wavy Gravy in his clown persona with the big green plastic garbage cans. I am really not sure if the older, more conservative adults from the student host’s family knew what was in the Kool-Aid, but I saw the well-dressed matriarch drinking some. About two hours later, after the ceremony, this same woman was getting her face painted and carrying a bubble wand.

Wavy’s speech included a song we all sang together to the accompaniment of his one-stringed “moon-lute.” He wrote it of course, but said it was an old hippie folk tune called “Basic Human Needs” …something about doing deeds to meet basic human needs from down in the garden of your heart.

     Wavy was not like any clown I had ever met. He was clever with words; for example, his “Nobody for President!” campaign, which was an easy formula: "Nobody can balance the budget! Nobody can end the war!” He liked sleight of hand and used it together with visual puns and sight gags with props.

He stayed with the school for a few days after graduation and I had the chance to I tell him I was interested in clowns, especially historical ones, like Grock and Grimaldi and the Commedia dell’ Arte.

            He asked me with some disbelief, “How do you know about Grock?”

            “I read about him in a book on clowns at the library. Not enough pictures.”

 Remember: There was no Internet in the 70s. If you wanted to do research there was the card catalog at the library…. and that was it. After discussing Grock and his musical clowning, Wavy loaned me his copy of a book called “The Fool and His Scepter” by William Willeford. It was by today’s academic standards an old-fashioned history and Jungian analysis of the Fool archetype. I am not sure when the “Killer Clown” motif appeared in popular culture, but this was before images of the circus "joey" or "Auguste" clown had been used in horror films as a symbol of unexpected evil, evolving by repetition into the clown as an expected evil, a subject of phobias and nightmares. In the 1970s I was lucky to be able to see a parade of great performing clowns like Geoff Hoyle, Mary Winegarden, Melinda Marsh, Larry Pisoni, Bill Irwin, Peggy Snider, Cecil MacKinnon, Gypsy Snider, and others, all passing through the west coast’s Pickle Family Circus. Nobody was making jokes about wasting mimes yet. Clowns and mimes had a more numinous, archetypal quality in the late 60s/early 70s, and the book Wavy loaned me was evidence of it.

A few months later, I visited Wavy, who was in the hospital. I tried to return his book. He said, “Keep it.”  I thought it might be because he was dying. He has cheated death several times since then and is still going. 

Many years later I noticed that Wavy was doing a “book signing” at the Broadway Tower Books in Sacramento. His book was about his free circus camps for kids. The program taught basic clowning and tumbling skills to disadvantaged inner-city boys and girls. I wanted to return his long lost clown book to him, hoping that that would jog his memory of me. I pulled out the book and said,

“I think this is yours.”

“You’re the kid who has my Fool and His Scepter!”

“I tried to return it to you when you were sick, but you said to keep it.”

“That’s probably because I thought I was going to die before I could read it again. But hey, I didn’t. I didn't die the last few times I almost died, either."

“Glad to hear that. I bought a copy of your book for you to sign.”

Wavy pulled out  his new book and said, “No, YOU sign MY book. This is my book signing.”

I laughed. This was Clown logic. Mullah Naz Rudin logic. Wise Men of Chelm logic. Marx Brothers logic. I felt this was an opening to tell Wavy something rather sentimental and fragile. I tried to get it out as economically as possible.

“I need to tell you something Wavy. My earliest memory of the circus is coming out of the show into the lobby area when I was less than 5. Kids were crowding around clowns who were stationed at each exit. I wanted to see a clown up close too, and said, “Why don’t I get to see a clown?” or something to that effect. What I remember my parents saying to me makes no sense, and they have no memory of giving me this apparently original bit of mythology. 

In my four-year-old mind, my parents told me, "There is a clown for every kid in the world, but your clown isn't here. You may not ever meet him, but he’s your clown."

 They were probably telling me something like “There aren’t enough clowns here to go around. All the clowns aren’t here." So, as a four-year-old I figured my clown was just somewhere else. But because of you, I got to meet mine after all.” 

As I said this I felt embarrassed. Not only was this a sentimental story, but I wasn’t sure whether it made me look imaginative or obsessive.

Wavy didn’t even acknowledge what I said. He thanked me for returning his copy of the Fool and His Scepter.  Disappointed, I turned to go. I had only taken a few steps when Wavy called out as if he were a carnival barker trying to drum up business.

“As I said to the mirror this morning, it’s all done with people!”  I turned back when he said this, just in time to see him pull up on his hat. His wig, “bald pate” and clown nose came with it, revealing his Hugh Romney face. He then lowered this “mask,” resuming his Waviness and Graviness and winked at me. I knew that it meant he knew what I meant. He just couldn’t be obvious about it. It had to be funny and off-the-wall, but it grew from deep in the garden of the heart.

Not So Secret Ballots: My Day as a Poll Inspector

I had no idea how much was involved in running a polling place when I volunteered to do it.  I have been unemployed for a long time and I was looking for any sort of work to do, whether it pays a token amount or nothing. The job of Poll Inspector paid a token amount that was close to nothing. When I saw my title, I thought I would be observing, just making sure everything went by the book. I didn’t realize yet that the Inspector not only has to know-it-all but be able to DO everything in the book, or that it was a jam-packed book!

My list of duties came in the actual paper-mail. After reading it, I started worrying. I am not the most organized person, even among hippie-artist types and absent-minded professors. In fact, I left my interior lights on in the car the night before election day and was saved by an alert neighbor. To strengthen my self-confidence, I thought about all the plays I had directed in my youth: all the last minute details and sudden unwarranted trust placed in those delegated to help. This couldn’t be harder than that. But it was. It was like doing an all-day play in a new space with no rehearsal and a cast you just met.

You have an hour to set up before opening the polls at 7 am.  I wanted to set up booths and a kiosk the day before, but there was an event in the space that night, so I couldn’t even move tables around. I had been keeping the entire polling place “set” in our guest room, and I loaded it back into the car at about 5 am on Tuesday morning. My wife helped me with the heavy Precinct Ballot Recorder.  I had yet to meet and had barely spoken to my crew on the phone.

No one was there when I arrived. They all drove into the small parking lot about 5 to six, including the man who was letting us into the facility. My Clerk crew consisted of: two precocious and hard-working 17-year old students, male and female; an alert and capable woman who looked too young to be a grandmother and spoke some Spanish; a round, calm bilingual woman with thick, shiny black hair and amazing multi-tasking abilities, and an older Asian woman who laughed at herself when she forgot something, but was ultimately reliable and unflappable.  I was very lucky that two of them had previously been Poll Clerks. They wondered why they gave me the job of Inspector since I had never been a clerk first, but they were nothing but helpful except for some good-natured teasing. They corrected me gently and let me delegate without question. They were a great crew.

The only real emergency was the malfunction of the Precinct Ballot Recorder’s printer. We already had to keep tallies and checklists on every single thing we did, so another would break our backs. I called a couple of emergency numbers on my election-dedicated cell phone before anyone answered. I could hear shouting in the background.

“How can I…. No! Just hold on…. Sorry, how can help you?”

“Our PBR printer has stopped printing and we get an error message on the screen…”

“Try tightening up the paper roll.”

“I tried that and it didn’t work. “

“Well, let me hand you off to someone who had more experience” he said, and I could relate.

The next voice on the phone said “Pull the printer out of the PBR, it’s only held in with Velcro.”

I reached down and felt for the bottom of the rectangular metal printer. I pulled hard on what felt like the edge of Velcro and the whole thing came out, heavy enough not to fly out of my hands from momentum and still attached by a cord to the rest of the Ballot Recorder. Everyone in the room looked over at me, especially my crew. I said quickly, “Don’t worry. It was just loud Velcro!”

 Back on the phone I said, “Ok, it’s out. Now what? “

“The switch is on the bottom. Turn it on and off again.”

“Ok.” I said, shrugging and flipping the switch. Suddenly the printer made a noise, the error message on the screen disappeared and voting was not interrupted. Even when we had a couple of different “problem voters," the voting never stopped.

    The first person who caused a problem approached the Roster Clerk waving a Vote-by-Mail envelope and reeling off a speech she had on “repeat” about how she didn’t ask for a Vote by Mail ballot.  Her problem as she saw it was that she had changed to Republican to vote in the Primary and that she had a REASON for doing so.  Because she wouldn’t stop talking, it was hard to explain anything to her. We suggested she vote provisionally, which was done by about 10% of the voters by the end of the day. Provisional voting means that even if you walked in off the street at the wrong polling place, you can still vote.  For her, it was a matter of some unknown principal that she not be forced to Vote Provisionally.

     “It counts the same as any other vote, and you get to vote for who you want either way,” I tried to explain.

     “No. I could understand if I had asked for a Vote by Mail envelope, but I didn’t.” she said, for maybe the fifth time since coming in the door. Then she went off her script and grumbled, “It’s a conspiracy against Republicans. It’s because they want to see “Ds” only. They sent me this ballot so I couldn’t vote Republican. But I changed for a reason.”

     Trying to keep from either getting angry or laughing I said, “No, I don’t think that’s the problem. “

     Finally, one of the more experienced poll workers on my crew came to my rescue. “Just let her vote with a crossover ballot and surrender the vote by mail ballot.” she said softly, from behind the irate woman. I held my hand out to receive her unused, and decidedly unwanted mail ballot, but she held onto it and stepped back. I threw my hands up and she tossed it on my table and went off smiling smugly. “Surrender” was the official term, but perhaps not the right choice of word when speaking to someone so certain their rights were being infringed upon by rabid liberals. When she left the ballot booth she kept up the smile, directed at me for some reason.  I guess she assumed I was a liberal despite my short hair, long pants, hard shoes and Captain America’s shield on my shirt.

     The second problem voter came in with a slower, more swaggering kind of defiance. She was wearing a high school athletic team workout-ensemble, sneakers and a baseball hat. She approached the Roster clerk and said her name and party before Sophia could ask her.

     “Sign here.” said Sophia, the high school senior.

     “Why do I have to sign?” asked the voter, squinting at the poor kid.

    Sophia looked back at me with a worried expression.  While smart and very competent she was only 17.   I chimed in, “Uh....so we can mark you off as having voted.”

     The woman in the gym-suit relaxed. “Ok, just asking. Got a right to ask, you know.”

     I am not making up any of this. I need to tell you that because you may not believe what happened next. The smiling Republican woman swaggered to the Precinct Ballot Reader and inserted it into the machine. The machine immediately spat it back out.

     “What the hell?” she exclaimed, her jaw dropping and her eyes getting wide.

     Roberto, the other 17-year-old poll worker said, “The machine printed an error message that you over-voted.”

     “What the hell does that mean?” she asked.

     “You voted twice in the same contest. The state senate candidates were on two separate pages, that’s usually where people over-vote.”

 “But not for President.” She said grabbing the ballot back. “As long as my vote for President gets counted…I still don’t think I messed up. Show me, where is the extra vote?”

     We were trained by the County Registrar’s office to answer any and all questions. Roberto opened and reached into the compartment on the Precinct Ballot Recorder and took out a previously over-voted ballot he had just put in there 15 minutes before.  After voting, the ballots show just a series of dots where the candidate’s vote holes were in the plastic guide pages. Without a key there is no way to tell which dot means what. Except that Roberto had circled where the over-voting on the Senate race occurred.

     “Here is another one that over-voted on the senate contest, see, it’s the same dots as yours.”

   As Roberto placed the voided ballot into the box on the machine and closed the lid, the woman squinted at it with suspicion. I suppose she thought it might be a secret compartment into which Republican votes disappeared forever. She thought better of saying anything aloud, but I saw her look and frown and tilt her head when the box disappeared into the machine.

      “You can override that vote and the rest will still count or you can vote again.” said Roberto, who waited for an answer.

   “That’s ok, then, override it. I came to vote for President.” Said the woman who wanted it known that she voted for Trump without saying it, just like the woman with the unwanted Vote by Mail Ballot.

     About a dozen registered Republicans cross-voted Democrat, each one ostensibly a vote for Bernie or Hilary. But there were also some who went the other way, usually from Libertarian to Republican. One of the men who did this said “My candidate has already won the nomination.”  Another man switching to Republican just came right out and said, “I came to vote for Trump.” I swallowed my concern and said, “You will need a Republican ballot.” Neither of these men looked like they would benefit from a Trump Presidency. 

     I think the poll workers probably WERE all Democrats, even the kids, who had a year to wait before they could vote. I am sure that as usual I was the farthest left of anyone in the room. Not one of us ever said anything about any candidate or issue during the entire 14-hour stretch, and neither did almost all of the voters. I suppose I could have invalidated the vote of the guy who said “I came to vote for Trump,” because he had arguably committed electioneering within 100 feet of the polls, but he was intimidating so I let it go.

           At 5 till 8, I stepped a few paces out the door and yelled, “The polls are closed!” Even before I had actually closed the doors, the Clerks all hurriedly began closing procedures according to the guidelines and checklists and tallies and report sheets. It was around this time that the sole of my left shoe came loose and began to flap. I wore one shoe until someone noticed, which took longer than you would think. I put it back on and made a flapping sound with every other footstep for the rest of the night. I felt like a lame clown as I assigned the crew to the final checks on everything. The two teenagers were panicking a little for the first time. They thought their numbers didn’t match between the Roster and the Voter Tally and the Ballot Count. Just as I began to be concerned, they figured it out and we were done. The closing and packing up took a little less than an hour.

    We loaded up my car with every last remnant of the polls, including the sealed White Box containing voided ballots and all election trash, including tiny bits of paper with nothing on them. After thanks and goodbyes, all but one of the crew got in their cars and drove away. It felt strange to say goodbye to them so quickly, thinking of what we had accomplished together and that we might not ever see each other again. At least that’s how it felt to me. Marisol, the multi-tasker stayed behind and rode with me to deliver the votes. As we pulled up in front of the City Center complex, a sort of “pit crew” suddenly appeared. The group of six or seven people began unloading as soon as I released the lock on the hatchback. After signing something no one had time to read, I took Marisol back to her car and we wished each other well. 

     Driving toward home I could hardly believe that the job was over and had been completely successful. I thought about how six strangers had made it possible for about five hundred people to participate in what passes now for democracy. Even an irresponsible vote for an irresponsible candidate is cast by an active citizen, taking some small amount of responsibility for the future.

Quick Lesson in History Lessons

     Back in the 1980s I read a book “America Revised” by Frances Fitzgerald. It was a thoroughly researched history of American history textbooks up to 1979.  From this book I first learned that until the civil rights era in the 1960s, slaves were depicted as appearing “magically” at some unspecified time and disappearing after the Civil War. In other words, history texts failed to mention that slaves were forcibly abducted and removed from their homes and families. Slave owners were commonly portrayed as generous, and the KKK as having “a worse reputation than it deserves.”(p.86 if you don’t believe me). Fitzgerald also described how Native Americans were represented favorably in the 1830s and 40s, more negatively after the Civil War (“savages”, “half-civilized”), and then omitted entirely from textbooks between the 1930s and the 1960s. Since reading that book and subsequent research, I have seen more evidence that as a nation we are defined by what we teach our children about our history. Sure, bad memes enter from outside the textbooks, but missing memes can be just as crucial in forming the identity and politics of each generation.

Short Jazz Fiction Today

If I was going to construct a piece out of sampled bits, I would capture all the "empty" spaces between the solos on all the Miles Davis Quintet records and arrange them in random order. Remember randomness? The resulting sound collage of treble time and bass space would be like one of Joyce's thunderwords: Phillijojimmicobbpolchamberstonywillyumsroncrater!