Lewis Lapham

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“The Confusion Begins With The Money”

August 28, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

For much of the 1960s, Lewis Lapham was a Saturday Evening Post correspondent who had the entire world as his beat, covering of-the-moment stories like the Beatles’ ill-fated 1968 visit to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Two years after that fascinating debacle, Lapham was in Alaska, now for Harper’s, to file a report about the black-gold rush, as oil money was remaking the frontier state, for better or worse. The opening of “Alaska: Politicians and Natives, Money and Oil“:

“Sunday evening, January 18, 1970. I arrived in Juneau yesterday afternoon, and already I’ve met twenty-seven people with twenty-seven contradictory visions of paradise regained. The confusion begins with the money.

Last September, at an auction in Anchorage, the state of Alaska raffled off oil concessions on the Arctic Ocean for $900 million. Which, in Alaska, is more money than princes find in fairy tales. Although two and one-half times the size of Texas, the state has a population of 280,000 (equivalent to the population of Des Moines, Iowa). For years the state has been poorer than Appalachia, dependent on federal grants to rescue it from annual bankruptcy; now that it is rich nobody knows how to distribute the largess.

I envy none of the politicians convened in this shambling, wooden town for the present meeting of the State Legislature. Almost all of them must stand for election later in the year (not only the Governor but also the entire Senate and half the House), and the more ambitious among them no doubt look upon the money with the gratitude of a crowd of Eskimos gathered around the body of a beached whale. I suspect, however, that the majority, more timid and mindful of the extravagant public expectations, will prefer to do nothing.

That is too bad only because they have a chance to do so much. In many ways Alaska resembles the American frontier one hundred years ago; like California before the freeways or Lake Erie before the fish died. Conceivably, the Alaskans could learn from the mistakes so evident elsewhere in the landscape; conceivably, they could come up with an alternative to the habit of mind (much admired by local chambers of commerce) that plunders the available resources and divides the spoils among the surviving interests. In the beginning there is the frontier; one hundred years later, given the genius of technology and the arithmetic of population, you end up with the crowds, and the bad air, and the fish floating in the rivers. The transformation is commonly called progress, and some of the people here fear it.

I remember that in Anchorage last autumn the women’s voices were the most wistful. The Legislature, in hopes of providing a rationale for its subsequent laws and distributions, summoned a preliminary conference to which it invited people from everywhere in the state. For three days I listened to teachers, Eskimos, bankers, Tlingit Indians, fishermen, petroleum engineers, guides, housewives, newspaper editors, and bush pilots. It was as if they were afraid of the consequences of the money. They kept talking about ‘Alaska the way it is now’ and ‘all those things we came up here to get away from.’ The politicians assured them that their fears were irrational, that Alaska must take its place in the twentieth century.

At the end of the conference I remember a woman standing uncertainly in the lobby of the Captain Cook Hotel; she was holding a sheaf of government papers of which she seemed suspicious, as if the pretentious language (‘parameters,’ ‘time-frames,’ ‘infrastructure,’ etc.) somehow announced impending ruin.

‘I listen to them talk,’ she said, ‘and I hear the trees falling in the forest.’

Tonight it is snowing, and perhaps I’m giving way to the pessimism of the weather; tomorrow I begin with debate in the State Senate.”

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“Liftoff Was A Blue Pill Taken On An Empty Stomach At 9 A.M.”

December 9, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I suppose the best argument for a war on drugs is that using narcotics is thought to lower IQ and if enough people in a society make themselves less intelligent, it puts that society at a disadvantage in the global marketplace. But here’s the problem with the prohibition of drugs: It doesn’t work. Not at all. Criminalizing something that consenting adults want to do just serves to enable a black market. And if people don’t have access to street drugs, they’ll abuse Oxycodone and the like. The war on drugs is not going to stop usage so we should stop the war on drugs. At Tom Dispatch, Lewis Lapham recalls his sole encounter with acid:

“So too in the 1960s, the prudent becoming of an American involved perilous transmigrations, psychic, spiritual, and political. By no means certain who I was at the age of 24, I was prepared to make adjustments, but my one experiment with psychedelics in 1959 was a rub that promptly gave me pause.

Employed at the time as a reporter at the San Francisco Examiner, I was assigned to go with the poet Allen Ginsberg to the Stanford Research Institute there to take a trip on LSD. Social scientists opening the doors of perception at the behest of Aldous Huxley wished to compare the flight patterns of a Bohemian artist and a bourgeois philistine, and they had asked the paper’s literary editor to furnish one of each. We were placed in adjacent soundproofed rooms, both of us under the observation of men in white coats equipped with clipboards, the idea being that we would relay messages from the higher consciousness to the air-traffic controllers on the ground.

Liftoff was a blue pill taken on an empty stomach at 9 a.m., the trajectory a bell curve plotted over a distance of seven hours. By way of traveling companions we had been encouraged to bring music, in those days on vinyl LPs, of whatever kind moved us while on earth to register emotions approaching the sublime.

Together with Johann Sebastian Bach and the Modern Jazz Quartet, I attained what I’d been informed would be cruising altitude at noon. I neglected to bring a willing suspension of disbelief, and because I stubbornly resisted the sales pitch for the drug — if you, O Wizard, can work wonders, prove to me the where and when and how and why — I encountered heavy turbulence. Images inchoate and nonsensical, my arms and legs seemingly elongated and embalmed in grease, the sense of utter isolation while being gnawed by rats.

To the men in white I had nothing to report, not one word on either the going up and out or the coming back and down. I never learned what Ginsberg had to say. Whatever it was, I wasn’t interested, and I left the building before he had returned from what by then I knew to be a dead-end sleep.”

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“No Week Goes By Without The Unveiling Of A New Medical Device Or Weapons System”

June 27, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From “How We Understand Our Gadgets,” Lewis Lapham’s new Tom Dispatch appraisal of these days of miracle and wonder:

“Like England in the late sixteenth century, America in the early twenty-first has in hand a vast store of new learning, much of it seemingly miraculous — the lines and letters that weave the physics and the metaphysics into strands of DNA, Einstein’s equations, Planck’s constant and the Schwarzschild radius, the cloned sheep and artificial heart. America’s scientists come away from Stockholm nearly every year with a well-wrought wreath of Nobel prizes, and no week goes by without the unveiling of a new medical device or weapons system.

The record also suggests that the advancement of our new and marvelous knowledge has been accompanied by a broad and popular retreat into the wilderness of smoke and mirrors. The fear of new wonders technological — nuclear, biochemical, and genetic — gives rise to what John Donne presumably would have recognized as the uneasy reawakening of a medieval belief in magic.

We find our new Atlantis within the heavenly books of necromancy inscribed on walls of silicon and glass, the streaming data on an iPad or a television screen lending itself more readily to the traffic in spells and incantation than to the distribution of reasoned argument.  The less that can be seen and understood of the genies escaping from their bottles at Goldman Sachs and MIT, the more headlong the rush into the various forms of wishful thinking that increasingly have become the stuff of which we make our politics and social networking, our news and entertainment, our foreign policy and gross domestic product.” (Thanks Browser.)

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“We Shape Our Tools, And Thereafter Our Tools Shape Us”

April 24, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Lewis Lapham’s TomDispatch post about publishing and technology, a passage about Marshall McLuhan’s idea that what we create ends up creating us:

“Why then does it come to pass that the more data we collect — from Google, YouTube, and Facebook — the less likely we are to know what it means?

The conundrum is in line with the late Marshall McLuhan’s noticing 50 years ago the presence of ‘an acoustic world,’ one with ‘no continuity, no homogeneity, no connections, no stasis,’ a new ‘information environment of which humanity has no experience whatever.’ He published Understanding Media in 1964, proceeding from the premise that ‘we become what we behold,’ that ‘we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.’

Media were to be understood as ‘make-happen agents’ rather than as ‘make-aware agents,’ not as art or philosophy but as systems comparable to roads and waterfalls and sewers. Content follows form; new means of communication give rise to new structures of feeling and thought.”

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