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Category Archives: Americana
The Exploratorium with the Grandkids
Photograph of August and Charlotte by Michele
Recently, Michele and I went to the new Exploratorium with my daughter, Samantha, and the Grandkids, Auggie and Charlotte. The Exploratorium bills itself as an interactive museum of art, science, and human perception based on the philosophy that science should be fun and accessible and was founded by Frank Oppenheimer, the brother of the famed – atleast to my generation – father of the atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer.
Right after WWII, Robert Oppenheimer was one of the most famous and revered scientists in American, second only to Albert Einstein, but he fell out of favor during the McCarthy era even having his security clearance revoked. (As the Dude might say, irony abides.) Robert’s brother, Frank Oppenheimer, was blacklisted during the same time because he had once been a member of the Communist Party during the 30’s.
Several years later, after rehabilitation, Frank moved to the Bay Area and founded the Exploratorium. I imagine family re-unions in which, over the years, the family star becomes less Robert and more Frank. I would certainly rather have Founder of the Exploratorium on my tombstone rather than Father of the Worst Killing Machine of All Time (so far).
This Exploratorium is new because it has moved to Pier 15 – on what used to be called the waterfront – from its previous digs in the Palace of Fine Arts. The old Exploratorium was one of my favorite places in San Francisco and I think the new one is already as good, has lots of space to enlarge, and is in an area that is rapidly becoming upscale tourist. Inside are lots of interactive science exhibits posing as games.
And art posing as science.
Another nice feature of the new Exploratorium is a new restaurant, Seaglass. It is a sort of free-form cafeteria with an – apparently – changing menu. When we went, there were four basic stations, pizza, tacos and quesadillas, salads, and sushi. The restaurant also offers natural soft drinks, organic and fair trade coffees and teas, and sparkling house-made drinking vinegar beverages and a bar that showcases artisanal distillers, many organic, and a thoughtfully curated wine and beer list. All this makes it sound much more pretentious than it really is in real life. It somehow seems like a perfect San Francisco kid friendly menu with sushi.
Outside, is a sculpture designed for kids where Michele took the portrait on top of the post, and behind that is a fog making machine because, I guess, San Francisco doesn’t have enough fog.
We spent several hours at the Exploratorium and I don’t think we even really scratched the surface. Thanks, Mr. Oppenheimer.
Syria
I remember a story – during our intervention, along with several NATO allies, in Bosnia and Herzegovina – about United States Army Forward Operating Base Cobra. This was in 1995 or so, after the majority of the fighting was over. FOB Cobra – if I may be so familiar – was the biggest American base around and it was surrounded by a plethora of concertina wire backed up by as many motion detectors as the supplier could talk the Army into. This was during the time when American soldiers going into town were required to wear helmets and body armor (other NATO troops wandered around in their uniforms with berets or other soft headgear).
Anyway, there was a farm nearby and the farmer had two teenage sons. They spent their teenage summer seeing how close they could get to FOB Cobra proper. When the teenagers were spotted by an motion detector, the lights would come on and sirens would go off. The base would go to Defcon One – or its local equivalent – with the entire base coming up to full attack defense status: all defensive positions were manned, the helicopter gunships were scrambled, and everybody was up and at their battle stations.
The thing is that after the first couple of attacks, everybody knew it was the kids but FOB Cobra couldn’t help itself. Every time the motion detectors were tripped, it reflexively reacted. Not in relation to a threat, everybody knew it wasn’t a threat, sort of like a reflexive knee jerk. I feel the same way about the United States and somebody else’s war. Somehow, we have to intervene. We just can not help ourselves. Obama ran on a platform of staying out of stupid wars like Iraq, and, he knows better, but he can’t help himself. Our body politic won’t let him.
Security and Obama and, well, ahhh, ehh, Obama
I have so many conflicting thoughts on Edward Snowden and the leaks from from the National Security Agency.
I think, Edward Snowden is a hero whistle blower and we need more people like him. I also think Edward Snowden seems sort of nuts and it is scary that people like him are able to get $200,000 per year jobs – supposedly – to protect us when they can’t even get themselves through Highschool.
I worry that this huge domestic spying regime is threatening our democracy. But I know that the government has been tracing our calls – duh! hasn’t anyone seen The Wire – for a long time, so what else is new? Sure, Snowden broke the law and abused the government’s trust in giving him a Security Clearance. But, he released information that everybody already knows, so No harm, no foul (and, lets face it, Google already knows all this information about me, or anybody who uses the internet for that matter).
And on and on.
Circling around behind all these thoughts – thoughts, bouncing around like a ping pong ball in a garbage disposal – is the awareness that the government is becoming stronger and more invasive and the people in power often puts their own interest above that of the People’s interest. And behind that, is the fear that Obama is worse than Bush in this regard or – atleast – has continued Bush’s polices and is more zealous in going after the whistle blowers. I am afraid that his promise of Transparency – that I so resonated with during the campaign – has been co-opted by the, increasingly, powerful Security State.
I also wonder what good this massive security apparatus is doing if they couldn’t even flush out a couple of amateurs like the Tsarnaev brothers who said they were Chechen and got the plans to their bomb from an internet site published by al-Qaeda in Yemen. Why weren’t their emails and searches picked up?
As my thoughts calm down, I realize that I am less concerned with the fact that we – my country – is wiretapping than the Administration’s reaction to the whistle blower. And that really boils down to What does Obama want to do and what does the Security Establishment want him to do?
PTSD and the American West
The American West has lots of abandoned buildings. By the American West, I don’t mean the western part of the United States. The western part of the United States has cities and towns, by The American West, I mean the parts in between. The iconic empty West where only cowboys and homesteaders live.
The abandoned buildings are remnants of somebody’s dream that they could carve a living out of a piece of marginal land. The settlement of the West and the dream of making a living on new land started before the Civil War – even Grant tried his hand at it in the 1850’s, facetiously calling the farm Hardscrabble, according to his wife, Julia – but, with the Railroads pushing west and The Homestead Act setting the stage, the pace picked up after the war.
In the Great Plains, most of these settlers were immigrant families from northern Europe. In the Nevada West, many of these immigrants were Basque. I wonder if many of these settlers were Civil War vets with PTSD. I know the Civil War was violent, unbelievable so compared to war now -although not compared to WWI or parts of WWII – and it is hard to believe that many of those battle wrecked veterans, especially Southerns, didn’t go West.
Driving out to the Smoke Creek with Claudia, however, I noticed that some of the abandoned homesteads are being reclaimed. I think that there are several reasons for this. Obviously, it is easier to Live off the grid than it ever has been before. Also, there are more people with two or three homes and one of them might be out in the boonies. But I think that there is another reason, one similar to the post Civil War period. We have been at war for the last decade and, today, there are more people with PTSD than 30 years ago.
I would be very surprised if the guy who lives in the house above also has an apartment in Manhattan. I would be much less surprised if he – or she, but probably he – was a veteran of, say Fallujah, trying to get away from the chaos of modern America. Moreover, like today’s pot, today’s PTSD is much stronger, with, I think, a component of Moral Injury that WWII vets usually didn’t have.
That why Drone Pilots really do get PTSD even though they they are never in physical danger. Without the draft, the people fighting our wars are easier to hide – or worship from afar – making what what they are doing also easier to hide, but it is no easier for them to hide from themselves. I think that alot of people who have PTSD really have Moral Injures. Killing an unarmed little boy and his, equally unarmed, mother goes against all our moral teaching. The fact that many – if not most – of the Americans doing the killing are conservative Christians only aggravates that Moral Injury.
As I drive by an abandoned farm with a new conex replacing an abandoned barn, I think how tough it must be to try to make a living on land so far away from everything. Then, I think, maybe that is the point.