THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 2, "MAD DOG in a SILVER FOG" :: CHAPTER 5, EPISODE 1

 

THE PEOPLE'S HERO!

 

  I detect FIT's hand in the emerging Max compiler; that tendency towards resentful irony one finds everywhere, now. A Stanford or MIT-tutored compilateur would have inserted Marx or Mao but, while Franklin's proximity to New York dictated a certain quotum of dope smoking and red flag waving, the paucity of Rockefeller and Guggenheim grants and poverty of its students also dictated certain detachment regarding the National Security State.

The stick and carrot of big machines... Oppenheimer's notion of the seducing qualities of the "technically sweet"... dividing hungry physics and math majors from their richer compatriots in arts and the humanities. Given the tenor of the times, FIT had to erupt... only the nature of eruption varied from the norm.

Last night when Berto introduced me to Engdahl, the Captain accepted drink with gratitude, but also that certain foreboding alcoholics bear, their Mark of Cain. Engdahl's memory was clear as English gin... he'd been Captain when Gunter Adrian and I floated between Rome and Sicily, three years ago. "A fine painter, a gentleman," the Captain remembers, "although too mixed up with the Catholics," he added, vehemently.

There's probably a story in how Engdahl had to depart his good job in the cruise industry and end up steering scotch tape and gum tankers for Wendell Pet, but I'm not one to bring it up... not this unholy fool with half a jaw and a bellyful of flies. Let it wait for "Jack Wagner's" Confidential! or "Maud Flicker"... maybe serialization in Cragmont Comix! Thor in rubber diapers, shaky Poseidon holding coffee in a church basement. Not my taste, not this time round.

The ignition of Franklin riots was local, as were so many epiphenomenal brushfires post-Chicago, but pre-Nixon. It wasn't anything so clear cut as the tenure of a controversial lecturer like Turing at Manchester or Oppenheimer... chased from MIT a few years back by conservative students, all the way to Princeton like a Dow Jones/Chemical recruiter. It wasn't over war-related projects, like at Cambridge... whose McCarthy-buttoned academics called ARPA's counter-insurgency databanks "misdirected technology" for compiling and sorting information on Thai villagers for Licklider and de Sola Pool... or like CASCON, the conflict analysis program developed with the support of future Watergator Elliot Richardson (one of the many progenitors of Salamanca's games). It was just a plain old labor spat that drove the geeks to the barricades. Ten or fifteen cents more hourly for janitors and cafeteria workers... mostly black and brown people, commuting from Elizabeth and Newark on creaky buses, bringing them to parity with the campus security... a lot of white ex-cops...

All this fine little stew needed was heat... promptly turned up by Mark Cobb... self-professed workers' hero. Cobb, son of factory workers, was a graduate student of industrial robotics, a budding Red Taylorite. Barry Freiberg was his batman, then, an undergraduate with vague ambitions of working the space program. Throw in Panther wannabe Omar Assim and on-the-make Mitch Kazelka... presto!

All days are final days, Brendan said later in his LA incarnation, to those who live them in sunsets of finality. Autistic children don't negotiate with their environment. And in the Franklin hippie paper, meanwhile, post-Chicago intimations of finality:

 

FABLE OF CAPITALISM

 

"The collapse has gone too far, too fast. The society is too sick, too far gone for treatment or cure. Conceived in greed and grown up in an atmosphere of swindle, swindle aided and supported by law, religion, press, media schools, the society has now become a design for death, not life. Nothing less than collapse and reconstruction can help us now. It is good citizenship, even love, to help the dying society to die and get it over with, so that the new and future generations can make a fresh start towards a liveable (sic) society fit for human habitation." 

 

- Lawrence Lipton (originally from the Los Angeles Free Press)

 

TOMORROW:

"DANDY WARHOL CREDIT CARDS!"

De Sola Pool and Licklider wrote many books - about world domination, libraries and television (not necessarily in that order), even a few of Lipton's rants were collected and bound and might even be found in the out-of-print nook...

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