Journey To The Desert's Edge, Part 7

Note: this is the seventh in a series of occasionally appearing entries focusing on deserts in general and the drylands of West Texas in particular

One particular desert lover's interest in the dry country can be traced to a specific time and place.  It would be a rainy summer day in the mid-1960s in Alexandria, Louisiana when he came across The Southwest by Herbert S. Zim.  The paperback with a crisp, glossy cover was part of the Golden Nature Guides published by Simon and Schuster... 

Dr Zim was both author and editor of this mini look at the dry country.  He'd taken a job redacting the series of Golden books in 1947 and began writing many of the titles two years later.  It was work he loved-- he was a science educator by trade and nature and he wanted every kid in the world to love the world of nature like he did...

Herbert S Zim's American Southwest was a terribly exotic place to a young lad who was poking around in a hobby shop on Lee Street, looking for plastic movie monster models made by a company in Aurora, Illinois... 

Scenic routes, Natural Wonders...

Peering out through a car window, what did our young desert aficionado see?  Central Louisiana had many lakes, rivers, bayous, and tall pine forests where dried red pine needles crackled under foot as he tromped through the woods.  There were cotton fields and alligators and honeysuckles on the vine with that sweet scent which reminded him of death... 

But the Southwest?  It was a different world defined by vast skies and sparse plants and mile after mile of open country.  Where in the Deep South did you find mesas and buttes?  Navajos or Apaches?  Gila monsters and horned toads?  Cacti reaching up to touch heaven and cowboys bent on raising hell?... 

If you were a kid growing up in the Fifties and Sixties and had to write a school report about reptiles or rocks or stars or bugs, you could go to the encyclopedia or you could go to Herbert S Zim.  He was usually the better choice.  The man had a gift for taking complicated subjects and explaining them simply.  Plus there were lots of pictures for attention deficit disorder types...

A prehistoric battle of titanic creatures, courtesy of Herbert S Zim
and Fossils, his guide to ancient wonders

Zim was born in 1909, the same year that my father came into the world.  He was raised in New York City and Santa Barbara, according to his obituary in the New York Times, and married twice.  His first wife was an anthropologist who predeceased him by almost fourteen years.  He had a PhD from Columbia and a brother named Milton.  And he was the man who penned the first book in which I saw mention of a dusty West Texas town called San Angelo...

Many years later and many miles away from Alexandria, a child's wide-eyed interest in deserts became a middle-aged man's passion for understanding the natural history of the dry country around San Angelo...

Herbert S Zim

In part, that desire may have had something to do with the nature of Alexandria and San Angelo.  Each is relatively isolated and distant from the largest population centers of their states.  Neither can be described as big cities, although residents in nearby small communities consider them such.  Both burgs sit on borderlands defined by rivers little known outside their respective states of Louisiana and Texas... 

Geographically, Alexandria sits between the Protestant North and Catholic South of the Bayou State.  Its citizens have only recently permitted themselves to openly admit the region's Creole and Cajun cultural influences by holding an annual Mardi Gras intended to snag tourist dollars.  But, true to the dour soul of North Louisiana and its less than ten thousand year old soil, it is advertised as a family friendly celebration...

Alexandria, Louisiana Mardi Gras: no nudity filled bachanals

San Angeloans share a similar uneasy relationship with the dry country.  Its presence is officially acknowledged.  The Chamber of Commerce web site says the city sits at 1900 feet on the northern boundary of the Chihuahuan Desert.  It is one thing to proclaim your town an oasis as do the good merchants of San Angelo.  But admitting the heat and aridity of the surrounding countryside is another.  Potential visitors and relocating businesses are promptly advised that, while the temperatures do reach the 100s in the summer, low humidity keeps the "heat index" down...

Half a mile down the road in West Texas

Other authoritative sources do the same to minimize the desert stretching for hundreds of miles to the west and south of the city.  Angelo State University informs web surfers that "two major biomes, as defined by Aldrich (1967) are present in the Concho Valley."  These are Pinyon-Juniper Woodlands and Mesquite-Grasslands.  Representatives of a third biome, Desert Scrub, enter the region from the southwest.  This particular page goes on to list a "few representative" Desert Scrub species that can be found on area rangeland: catclaw, creosote bush,  white brush, and guajillo...

Why would anyone save a crank quibble with this summary of Concho Valley biomes?  Let us look at what the author has to say before stomping our feet in academic tantrum.  In commenting on the Mesquite-Grassland biome, the writer lists mesquite, agarita, lotebush, and prickly pear cactus as being common.  Grasses are described as "short grasses" with one of the listed species being Hilaria mutica aka tobosa grass.  Another of those listed is Aristida purpurea...

Aldrich's Mesquite-Grassland, or at least its Concho Valley incarnation, sounds a lot like what contemporary students of the subject call degraded desert grassland... 

Desert grassland:  Tobosa and Mesquite

Hilaria mutica (now renamed Pleuraphis mutica) rarely grows outside of Arizona, New Mexico, and western Texas.  It is, simply put, a desert grass.  Other grasses on the ASU list of Mesquite-Grassland species prefer dry environments.  Some, like Aristida purpurea, can be found on short grass prairies as well as desert grasslands.  Others, including Bouteloua breviseta, have distributions limited almost entirely to the Chihuahuan Desert region...

[Those readers inclined to rangeland agronomy as a hobby will realize that grasses, in general, have wider distribution patterns than do most shrubs or forbs.  What we now call desert grasslands belong to southwestern Texas, southern and central New Mexico, and much of southern and central Arizona.  The soils of desert grasslands (like other southwestern desert soils) tend to be light colored at the surface due to a lack of organic content and they rest on hard layers of insufficiently leached salts and chemicals known as caliche.]

If the grasslands near San Angelo are desert grasslands (and not merely an extension of shortgrass prairie country), the outer edges of the Chihuahuan Desert reach into the Concho Valley.  We can support our argument by considering local shrubs and succulents.  The woody plants listed as characteristic of Aldrich's Mesquite-Grassland biome are primarily desert plants even though some, like mesquite, extend into central and southeastern Texas...

Walter Prescott Webb

Personally, I tend to see Texas desert country as the area west of the 100th meridian and south of the 32nd parallel with a dogleg northwestward toward Midland and Lubbock.  This is the part of the state where potential evapotranspiration rates are at least three times greater than average yearly precipitation... 

Distribution maps for our Mesquite-Grassland shrubs, however, make a good case for the boundaries of Dryland Texas actually extending closer to the 98th meridian.  While I would enjoy taking credit for attaching significance to this particular imaginary map line, historian Walter Prescott Webb beat me to the punch in 1931 when he published The Great Plains...

In his 1931 book, Walter Prescott Webb
argued the lack of timber and water beyond
the 98th meridian forced a change in the
technology and culture of Anglo-Americans

This University of Texas scholar, spent nine years mulling over the question of why it took Americans, ever a restless lot, as long as it did to settle the Great Plains between the Rockies and eastern seaboard.  He eventually concluded this vast level land, by lacking trees and abundant rainfall or water sources, was a natural force outside the cultural experience of Anglo-Americans living near the Atlantic Ocean... 

Webb argued this unfamiliar environment also forced profound adaptations to traditional American lifestyles before the Plains could be settled: timber-based homes on in Virginia became sod huts in Kansas, cattle ranching in the Texas Panhandle required huge tracts of land as opposed to a few grass-rich acres constantly renewed by frequent rain in Louisiana, etc.  The new and desolate environment demanded a new technology to make its settlement possible:  barbed wire fences, windmills, revolvers...

Still, the question asked earlier remains: why do West Texans minimize the presence of the desert?.. 

Praying for rain is a staple of religious practice in the Concho Valley and Trans-Pecos.  Local businesses attempt to outdo each other in demonstrating their piety in this regard.  One area clergyman goes so far as to refer to the area's natural aridity as a demon...

Faith is a laudable thing but a person does have to ask why people seem to ignore what grows from the earth around them.  Based on personal travels western Concho Valley, I vouch for the presence of creosote bush, catclaw, guajillo and white brush as well as wider-ranging lotebush, prickly pear, mesquite, and agarita.  Tobosa grass interrupts the barren spots of ground on my property...

Religion in West Texas

I can also say, based on what my own eyes have seen, that the western Concho Valley provides a nice dry home for tarbush, lechuguilla, javelina bush, feather dalea, four-wing saltbush, longleaf ephedra, ocotillo, desert sumac, and soap bush... 

This list of xeric shrubs could be expanded to include another forty or fifty woody plants and succulents such as pencil cactus, goatbush, yucca, and allthorn.  The presence of some of these plants in an uncultivated state helps us understand the true nature of the land supporting them.  Distribution patterns of tarbush, James A MacMahon notes in his book, Deserts, basically outline the boundaries of the Chihuahuan Desert in the United States.  Much the same can be said of lechuguilla.  Ditto javelina bush...

Herbert S Zim's American Southwest

Perhaps, our search for an answer to why there is a simultaneous grudging admission of the presence of the desert and a stubborn refusal to admit the extent of its power on our lives in the Concho Valley lies elsewhere.  No one who lives in West Texas denies the country is dry and hard or that water is scarce and rare.  But few are those who will suggest continued agricultural activities, particularly farming, may lead to even greater water shortages...

The answer as to why that is may have little to do with science or traditional religion.  It may lie in a myth shaped by history and the whims of nature...

A ceramic Tlatilco style figurine, dating to
approximately 1000 BCE, from the collection
of Herbert S and Sonia Bleeker Zim

For the botanically inclined interested in learning more about these plants of the western Concho Valley: catclaw (Acacia greggii), creosote (Larrea tridentata), white brush (Aloysia gratissima), guajillo (Acacia berlandieri), mesquite (Prosopis glandulosa), agarita (Mahonia trifoliata), lotebush (Ziziphus obtusifolia), prickly pear cactus (Opuntia spp), tarbush (Flourensia cernua), lechuguilla (Agave lechuguilla), javelina bush (Condalia ericoides), feather dalea (Dalea formosa), four-wing saltbush (Atriplex canescenes), longleaf ephedra (Ephedra trifurca), ocotillo (Fouquieria splendens), desert sumac (Rhus microphylla), soap bush (Guaiacum angustifolium), pencil cactus (Cylindropuntia leptocaulis), goatbush (Castela erecta), yucca (Yucca spp), and allthorn (Koeberlinia spinosa) 

        

LRNARTS MARKETPLACE:

For fine art prints and greeting cards by Louis R Nugent, visit:

http://louis-nugent.artistwebsites.com/

Featured this week:

Fine Art America now features West Texas painting, drawings, and photographs by Jeniffer Stapher-Thomas of El Paso, Texas, Paula Loftin of Ada, Oklahoma, Karen Slagle of Amarillo, Texas,  Linda Cox of Graham, Texas, Suzanne Girard Theis of Houston, Texas, Judi Bagwell of Greenwell Springs, Louisiana, Karen Boudreaux of Houston, Texas, Joe JAKE Pratt of Kerrville, Texas, David Pike of Lubbock, Texas, Ken Brown Pioneer of Sand Springs, Oklahoma, and Louis R Nugent of San Angelo, Texas at:

 http://fineartamerica.com/groups/west-texas.html?tab=overview

This week's featured artist: Judi Bagwell

Fine Arts America now features  work celebrating the mysterious and lovely Bayou State and its unique lifestyle:

http://fineartamerica.com/groups/cajun-country-louisiana.html

This week's featured artist: Scott Pellegrin

CREDITS

Note: All photographs for this essay were located through Google Images or Wikipedia, without authoritative source or ownership information except as noted: Pray For Rain from poleshift.ning.com; Tobosa grass from polyploid.com; Herbert S Zim from naturalpatriot.org; Herbert Zim's American Southwest from vintagepbks.com; The Southwest by Herbert S Zim cover and The Great Plains by Walter Prescott Web cover from amazon.com; Alexandria Louisiana Mardi Gras from alexmardigras.com; ceramic Tlatilco Style figurine from Zim collection at Logan Museum of Anthropology, Beloit College; Half A Mile Down The Road in West Texas from Louis R Nugent 

Fascists, Socialists, And Other Political Pains In The Artistic Rump

"Hannah, can you hear me? Wherever you are, look up, Hannah. The clouds are lifting. The sun is breaking through. We are coming out of the darkness into the light. We are coming into a new world, a kindlier world, where men will rise above their hate, their greed and brutality. Look up, Hannah. The soul of man has been given wings, and at last he is beginning to fly. He is flying into the rainbow — into the light of hope, into the future, the glorious future that belongs to you, to me, and to all of us. Look up, Hannah. Look up!"-- Charlie Chaplin, The Great Dictator, 1940

On January 19, 1940, The Three Stooges, a slapstick comedy team not noted for either subtle or sophisticated humor, broke the unofficial code of silence and dared go where Hollywood had not dared go before... 

They released their 44th short, a little gem entitled You Nazty Spy, clearly mocking the German dictator Adolf Hitler (and his Italian counterpart, Benito Mussolini) over the course of seventeen minutes and fifty-nine seconds.  Moe, the so-called "brains" of the outfit, becomes dictator of Moronica after corrupt businessmen install a puppet regime of vicious, inept, and murderous simpletons...

In a departure from the norm, the Stooges
play not only incompetent characters but a
trio of murderous villains.  The short ends
with their noxious characters meeting grisly
deaths after being torn apart and eaten
alive by lions.

You Nazty Spy sneaked onto the big screens of America, more likely than not, as a result of Hays Code enforcers  paying less attention to comedy shorts than it did to feature-length films.  Hollywood had voluntarily begun to censor itself in the 1920s in response to public outcry and legislation meant to curb the film industry's "moral decadence."  A group of producers hired President Warring G Harding's Postmaster General, Will Hays, to rebuild Hollywood's image.  Hays was a Presbyterian elder and a former Republican National Committee chairman who successfully managed Warren G Harding's campaign for the Presidency. He was paid $100,000 yearly by movie-makers to impose small town social values on a big city business...

Films critical of foreign dictators would have to pass a "Fairness Test" which forbade the outright mockery of and/or displays of contempt for another nation's leader.  Additionally, several powerful United States Senators (including Burton Wheeler and Gerald Nye) consistently pressured Hollywood to avoid producing anti-Nazi movies...

The Stooges comedy short appeared nine months or so before Charlie Chaplin satirized Hitler in The Great Dictator...

Censor In Chief Will Hays, Postmaster General
under the equally fun and flamboyant President
Warren G Harding, helped Hollywood make sure
flappers didn't flap too much.

 Chaplin began work on a film which is arguably his masterpiece and certainly one of the great movies of the Twentieth Century in 1938.  He and French director Luis Buñuel had attended the same showing of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Buñuel was horrified by the effectiveness of the documentary, which memorialized the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, fearing it would captivate less critical audiences as easily as it had captivated him.  Chaplin laughed out loud, amazed thinking people would take a band of goose-stepping thugs seriously.  Chaplin's second response to Triumph of the Will was to parody Hitler's megalomania by having the great dictator lose out to a poor Jewish barber who believes in a world of justice and love and progress through reason...

Art and Politics have long wooed one another...

The occasional romance between artist and politician should be expected by people who are neither politicians nor artists.  A politician (in his or her most noble form) seeks solutions for society's many problems and looks to find theories and philosophies that can consistently be used to allocate power and resources for the greater good.  The artist works in the symbolic world, employing images and forms to express larger truths...

Adenoid Hynkel, ruler of Tomania, plays with the world as if it
were his little toy in Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator

When the artist and the political extremist join forces, rare is a subtle result.  A more likely result is a poster in bold colors with idealized, noble men and women heroically struggling for the earthly realization of The Cause-- be it Fascism, Socialism.  Short slogans reduce complex arguments to simple mantras recited reverently by the True Believer.  Of course, this marriage of image and ideology is not limited to totalitarian minds.  Even in the most democratic society, the artist produces propaganda...

Fascism and Socialism-- the bugbears of the political Left and the political Right-- are, it seems, easily defined by those who do not study them.  One only has to hop on social media like Facebook or Twitter to learn that Democrats are bent on succeeding where Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin failed in planting the red hammer-and-sickle flag over City Hall in Topeka or that Republicans would gladly reinstitute not only slavery but giggle at the thought of poor kids dying because their lazy families have been kicked off welfare...

Political scientists have much more difficulty defining the various totalitarian isms...

Totalitarian states such as the Soviet Union often employ a "cult of
personality" in which leaders become secular gods,  In this 1967
poster, Kremlin leaders resurrect the long dead VI Lenin with the
message "Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will yet live!"

Exactly what is a fascist?  Most people would agree the Axis Powers of World War II-- Germany, Japan, Italy-- were fascist states.  Each government had common traits.  They were dictatorships that allowed little or no opposition to the strong man's party and prone to militarism, expansionism, and extreme nationalism.  Industrialists worked hand-in-hand with the state to achieve the New Order.  Fascist states were marked by hierarchies of power that culminated in an elite ruling class.  Any pretense at democracy in the Axis Powers existed solely to validate the ruling party.  The authoritarian nature of fascism required fascists to despise and fear liberalism, be it political or cultural...

Perceptive readers will notice many of these characteristics also describe the Soviet dictatorship...

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics differed from the fascist states in several key ways-- the government oversaw property and income distribution with minimal input to either activity based on individual labor or market forces.  It leaders, obviously, did not share the fascist's almost paranoid loathing of Marxism.  They were also careful to note the USSR was not a true communist state in which the state owns property and citizens share in the common wealth, each according to his need.  V I Lenin, as early as 1921, had told his fellow Communists small private business enterprises in the Soviet Union and trade with capitalist nations were necessary to stabilize the country as it evolved toward a true communist state...

Messiah of Evil:  The genocidal Adolf Hitler is shown
leading his resolute followers into the future as the very
heavens open to light his way.

But, once we get past the surface, the complexities of defining socialism and fascism accurately have challenged some of the best political scientists.  One school of thought sees fascism as socially radical, another as the epitome of extreme conservatism.  Scholar A describes fascism as irrational while Scholar B argues it is supremely rational in its strategies, goals, and methods...

Disagreements inside the Brain Trust usually happen for good reasons... 

Axis Power states differed in key respects, not only in the theorists who advocated them but in actual practice.  One difference revolved around questions of racial purity versus mere national superiority...

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin's rival Leon Trotsky
becomes a devil in this poster whose artist is
careful to point out Trotsky's Jewish origins in a
not very subtle appeal to the anti-Semitism of the
intended audience.

Neither Benito Mussolini nor Hideki Tojo shared Adolf Hitler's genocidal anti-Semitism.  The Italian dictator officially rejected discrimination against Jews as late as 1934, eventually deciding to enact anti-Jewish measures to cement his alliance with Germany.  Although Tojo viewed the Japanese as a racially superior people, neither he nor his government saw any reason to embrace Hitler's Final Solution.  There are some estimates that as many as 24,000 Jews escaped the Holocaust by emigrating to Japan where they were welcomed.  One Japanese official, Koreshigu Inuzuka, avoided trial as a war criminal due to his efforts in aiding Jews flee Nazi Germany...

Another aspect of fascism that proves troublesome to scholars is whether or not it has a relationship to conservative political and economic policies.  Marxist theoreticians assert fascists want to use government to support capitalism and suppress inevitable socialist revolution...

Other analysts suggests true fascism's true goals are anti-conservative: the men behind these movements preach creation of new national cultures.  Social values, behavioral norms, art, politics, economic activity-- all of which are to be integrated into a single and homogenous national community... 

"Do Not Forget The U S Imperialist Wolves!"   North
Korean propaganda depicts American soldiers taking
time out of their busy day of destroying villages to
enjoy drowning babies while helpless parents are forced
to watch.

Tactics for achieving this integration essentially mass-marketed the idea of a common national identity.  Mussolini built stadiums, sponsoring huge sporting events to fill them with the Italian people.  He financed filmmakers and paid artists to create celluloid and stone monuments to values held dear by fascists.  In Germany, the Nazi Party flooded the marketplace and theaters with books, artwork, and movies that pointed the way to the creation of New Racially Pure Man and New Racially Pure Woman...

Neither dictator's behavior came close to embracing or mimicking a basic trait of a true conservative: change is best only when truly necessary and, even then, only when it is slow and carefully considered...

[The increasing ease with which American voters demonize each other is, I suspect, not healthy for the nation's future.  Even a brief examination of the history and/or theories behind fascism or socialism shows neither major political party in the United States can accurately be described as fascist or socialist, despite the wishes of its opponents.]

 

Jesse Owens, an American, won four gold medals
at the 1936 Olympics.  His performance repudiated
claims of  "Aryan" superiority.

Director Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia leaves
modern viewers with a difficult question: what
do we do with the artist who is clearly a major
talent and who embraces truly odious notions?

Within any authoritarian state or political movement, there is the constant struggle to maintain ideological purity intertwined with a ceaseless need to purge those who deviate from the True Way and embrace the heresy of the political enemy.  As Stalin had his Leon Trotsky to be sent into exile and murdered in Mexico, so Mao had his General Peng who dared ask how great and far forward a leap was The Great Leap Forward...

Artists in totalitarian states must work within ideologically acceptable guidelines but may enjoy a slight latitude not enjoyed by the ordinary citizen.  They are, after all, people not quite like the rest of us, the authoritarian tells himself, but can be quite useful in swaying the masses.  One should require not much more of them than genuine dedication to The Cause, even if that devotion is slightly fuzzy or impure due to the nature of the way the artistic brain works...

Soviet Communists and Red-Hating Will Hays
could agree on one thing: "Stop! You Decadent
Flappers!"

Collaboration between Oppressive State and Artist can lead to many difficult questions for those who live in other times or places.  What do we do with the artist who is clearly talented but whose work espouses a truly repulsive cause?  Do we ignore them and let their work disappear into the trashcans of history?  Or should we judge their work on its artistic merits, without regard to the politics it celebrates?  Perhaps we should applaud their talent but deplore their politics?  Director Leni Riefenstahl offers a case study...

Luis Buñuel, we recall, found himself horrified by the power of Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will.  I share his fear.  Riefenstahl uses her cameras to create a montage of events, carefully editing the footage to show an endless flow of close-ups of spectators and marching party members merging into long shots of the Nazi Party Rally.  The camera zooms in on the symbols of the Party-- massive eagles, hundreds of swastika-adorned flags-- and then places the audience on the reviewing stand with Hitler as he looks out at the crowd.  She creates a sense of inevitable triumph through constantly identifying the viewer with the adoring masses, the steel-willed soldiers, and the dictator himself...

After World War II ended, Riefenstahl found herself first arrested by the Allies and then persona non grata in the artistic world after she was released without being charged as a war criminal.  There is no doubt she was committed to the Nazi cause-- a newspaper article from 1934 quotes Riefenstahl as saying she became a devout National Socialist by the time she'd finished reading the first page of Hitler's Mein Kampf...

When Charlie Chaplin began filming The Great Dictator,
the British government announced the movie would not
be shown in British theaters.  Like many other nations, the
British foolishly thought a policy of appeasement would
curb Hitler's ambitions.  England was at war with Germany
by the time filming was completed and The Great Dictator's
anti-Hitler message quickly found its way to British
movie screens.

Yet there are some hints that Riefenstahl was not totally committed to every aspect of Nazi ideology, despite her 1937 statement to a Detroit News reporter that "Hitler is the greatest man who ever lived.  He truly is without fault..."

Riefenstahl was touring America in 1938 when Nazi hooligans carried out Krystallnacht while German police looked the other way.  The "Night of Broken Glass" pogrom left 91 Jews dead and 30,000 rounded up for deportation to concentration camps.  A thousand synagogues were burned and more than seven thousand Jewish-owned businesses were vandalized.  Riefenstahl's reaction to the news was shocked disbelief and heated denial that Adolf Hitler had any part in such evil acts...

The Birth of a Nation glorified the "heroic"
Ku Klux Klan as it fought to protect White
America and its women from the menace of
the emancipated Negro and carpetbaggers.

Her Olympia, celebrating the 1936 Olympics, had just been released.  Riefenstahl was in the United States promoting the film when Krystallnacht took place and she found herself defending her Fuhrer.  As time passed, some critics saw Olympia as either an entirely apolitical documentary (as Riefenstahl maintained until her death) or a subtle mockery of the very idea that a Master Race existed.  As she had celebrated Hitler in   Triumph of the Will, Riefenstahl glorified American Jesse Owens, a black track and field athlete who triumphed over her idol's Aryan supermen...


And what do we do with the legacy of America's own D W Griffith, the director of 1915's Birth Of A Nation, which was both the first film screened in the White House and a powerful recruiting tool for the Ku Klux Klan.  What do we make of his best known work, based on a novel written by a college classmate of President Woodrow Wilson?  There are those who list it among the greatest American films.  Others say every single print should be burned...           

Paulette Goddard, seen in a studio publicity pose,
co-starred as "Hannah" in The Great Dictator.

NEWS CORRAL:

Demographer William Frey looks at the often hostile attitude of baby-boomers toward a more culturally and racially diverse United States:

http://www.reporternews.com/news/2012/jul/07/william-h-frey-baby-boomers-and-americas/

LRNARTS MARKETPLACE

Artwork by Louis R Nugent now available:  For fine art prints and greeting cards, visit:

http://louis-nugent.artistwebsites.com/

Featured this week: Portrait of a woman on a downtown wall

Fine Art America now features West Texas painting, drawings, and photographs by Paula Loftin of Ada, Oklahoma, Karen Slagle of Amarillo, Texas,  Linda Cox of Graham, Texas, Suzanne Girard Theis of Houston, Texas, Judi Bagwell of Greenwell Springs, Louisiana, Karen Boudreaux of Houston, Texas, Joe JAKE Pratt of Kerrville, Texas, David Pike of Lubbock, Texas, Ken Brown Pioneer of Sand Springs, Oklahoma, and Louis R Nugent of San Angelo, Texas at:

 http://fineartamerica.com/groups/west-texas.html?tab=overview

This week's featured artist: Karen Boudreaux

Fine Arts America now features  work celebrating the mysterious and lovely Bayou State and its unique lifestyle:

http://fineartamerica.com/groups/cajun-country-louisiana.html

This week's featured artist: Susan Bordelon

CREDITS

Note: All photographs and other images for this essay were located through Google Images or Wikipedia, without authoritative source or ownership information except as noted: "Stop, You Decadent Flappers" from wildpostcards.com; 1967 Soviet Lenin Lived propaganda poster from guardian.co.uk; Will Hays: Censor In Chief from history.hanover.edu

Scenes From The World of Tomorrow

"But from the large glass skylight of this larger room, everybody saw the weird arc of flaming lightning that came from the very heavens above, from the top-most point of the skyscraper high Trylon that adjoined the great ball...There was a single scream of horror from the doctor...Then there was only the stench of flesh and the ozone smell... Alexis Mandroff had died the death of white-hot fire."--  Kenneth Robeson, The World's Fair Goblin, 1939

The first time I really thought about the 1939 World's Fair in New York probably came courtesy of a Bantam Book's reprint of a Doc Savage pulp novel.  I felt a certain delight to learn this particular Man of Bronze adventure featured Doc's cousin, Pat.  She was quite the firecracker who took a perverse pleasure in hinting straight-laced Doc might decide to permanently quit hanging around with his five erudite male associates if he spent a few days in a remote cabin in the woods with her...

Pat owned and operated a toney uptown spa and salon in the Big Apple when she wasn't helping Doc and The Boys deal with werewolves, sea serpents and a plethora of maniacal sociopaths bent on world domination.  In the case of the World's Fair Goblin, the insane genius was one Dr Alexis Mandroff who'd figured out a way to turn folks into hairy eight-foot goblins.  He was well on his way to creating an army of said man-apes when Doc, Pat, and The (chronically inept with women) Boys foiled his nefarious and clever evil master-plan...

Bantam Books reprint of the 1939
Doc Savage pulp novel about the evil
Alexis Mandroff's plot to create an
goblins

Kenneth Robeson (a house pseudonym for writers of the Doc Savage adventures for Street and Smith Publications) set his story at an international exhibition touting itself as a gateway to the World of Tomorrow...

1939 World's Fair at Night

In retrospect, Robeson's tale of technology gone awry in lunatic hands may have been put in the perfect setting.  The beginning of Common Era year 1939 found Americans nearly a decade into the financial nightmare triggered by the Great Depression.  Across the Atlantic, a genocidal dictator had set himself on a collision course with World War II.  In Japan, Inspector-General of Aviation Tojo Hideki was positioning himself to become Prime Minister-- a post he held on December 7, 1941.  Industrialists in Germany, Italy, and Japan were in love with fascism and offered it the best in battlefield technology...

Latin American dancers added to the multicultural
celebration of the World of Tomorrow

A group of retired New York City cops had the notion in 1935 that what America needed was something that both took the public's mind off the Great Depression and celebrated American know-how.  They formed a committee that attracted the attention of prominent businessmen like Winthrop Aldrich and reform-minded Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, a Republican who enthusiastically supported the New Deal policies of President Franklin Roosevelt.  Aviator Howard Hughes would fly around the world in 1938 to promote the World's Fair born from that first meeting of retired policemen... 

Trylon and Perisphere at night with statue of George
Washington.  The 1939 World's Fair opening was timed
to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the first
President's inauguration

Scientists Albert Einstein and Harold Urey came on board to support the project under the assumption it would celebrate science.  The Fair did celebrate science but in its applied form-- i.e., golly-gee-whiz- Buck-Rogers-Ain't-Got-Nothing-On-That-state-of-the-art gadgetry (such as RCA's transparent Lucite-enclosed television set) that wowed consumers...

RCA's "transparent television" captivated Fair visitors
with its promise of a world where moving images of
actual events could and would be transmitted almost
instantaneously over a distance of hundreds of miles

[ ELEKTRO the ROBOT amazes the audience:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T35A3g_GvSg ]

Organizers had faith in the days to come.  An official pamphlet for the 1939 World's Fair spread the Gospel of Optimism:  "The eyes of the Fair are on the future-- not in the sense of peering toward the unknown nor attempting to foretell the events of tomorrow and the shape of things to come, but in the sense of presenting a new and clearer view of today in preparation for tomorrow; a view of the forces and ideas that prevail as well as the machines. To its visitors the Fair will say: Here are the materials, ideas, and forces at work in our world. These are the tools with which the World of Tomorrow must be made"...

The 1939 World's Fair celebrated the future that would come to
us through American Business and Industry

Equally important to the retired police officers and their banker/industrialist friends was a profound and abiding faith in basic principles of democracy and human rights.  Opening day of the New York's World's Fair was carefully timed to coincide with the 150th anniversary of George Washington's inauguration as first President of the United States.  Great Britain contributed a rare and carefully preserved copy of the Magna Carta used by medieval barons to force a tyrannical king to acknowledge the rule of law... 

The Magna Carta had been used by medieval barons in 1215 to force tyrannical king John to acknowledge certain basic rights.  No free man, the nobles compelled their Monarch By The Grace Of God to say, could be punished except in accordance with the law of the land.  "The Great Charter of the Liberties of England, and of the Liberties of the Forest" stayed in the United States well past the end of the Fair-- locked away in protective custody for the duration of World War II.  Alongside it in a vault at Fort Knox lay the Declaration of Independence, the most sacred of our national documents...   

The Four Freedoms, revered and
celebrated by Fair organizers, as
sculpted by Leo Friedlander

Four statues graced the entrance of the World of Tomorrow and forced all visitors seeking a glimpse of mankind's future to accept their massive presence.  They represented Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom of Religion, and Freedom of Assembly...

Two modernistic structures--  the 610' spire-shaped Trylon and the 180' in diameter globelike Perisphere--  symbolized a Utopian future city.  They were connected by the world's longest escalator.  The Four Freedoms guarded the way to these Art Deco masterpieces.  The Trylon and Perisphere would be razed to the ground after the Fair closed, their metal hauled away to smelters to be used in the free world's desperate effort to prevent the Nazi vision of the world of tomorrow from becoming reality...

The World of Tomorrow-- a Free Press, Gratitude for
America's Founding Fathers, and Cities built
upon Utopian Dreams come true

Artists, some say, have a clearer vision of the future than businessmen.  This may or not be true but it's a theory that seems to hold water when applied to the 1939 World's Fair.  Surrealist Salvador Dali created an exhibit for the first of two World's Fairs held at the same site in Flushing.  He called it "The Dream of Venus."

Entrance to Salvadore Dali's "Dream of Venus"

Dali with head: the surrealist artist in a publicity
photo showing him at work in creating the Dream
of Venus

Salvadore Dali: The Persistence of Memory, 1931

Dali had become known to the general public in America four years or so before the World's Fair.  A 1934 New York showing of his work included 1931's The Persistence of Memory, which depicted melting watches along a barren seashore ending at the base of an equally barren cliff.  When many of us think of surrealism, the picture that comes to mind is often this enigmatic painting with its hint time is more fluid than we think... 


  

Taxi Rider-- one of Dali's disturbing visions of the world of tomorrow

Dali described his artistic style as "paranoiac critical"--
the juxtaposition of two apparently unrelated objects in
disturbing images meant to force the viewer to expand his
perception of the world by finding associations between
the objects

Ticket-buyers to "The Dream of Venus" stepped into a world of dark, dreamlike scenes meant to force the mind into making associations between apparently unrelated images, a technique Dali referred to as "paranoiac critical".  In one of the works, a woman's nude body becomes a keyboard for a piano...

Souvenir Postcard from the World of Tomorrow

Dark and disassociated from the normal world of reality would be a fair description of the hell on earth unleashed by the fascists who had a very different vision of the future than the one retired American cops believed in...

Artwork viewed by Fair visitors included Frank Paul's
Micromegas

[For lovers of futuristic literature, we note the First World Science Fiction Convention was held in conjunction with the 1939 World's Fair from July 2 to July 4.  Attendees included John W Campbell, Isaac Asimov, and Ray Bradbury.

The Post Office helped celebrate the
World of Tomorrow through a special
commemorative issue.  This image is the
author's reworking of that stamp.

Campbell, incidentally, had pretty much reached his peak as a science fiction writer at the time of the convention.  He remained an extremely influential figure in the genre for decades as editor of Astounding Science Fiction (later renamed Analog Science Fiction and Fact) until his death in 1971.  Movie buffs may know 1951's The Thing from Another World is based on Campbell's "Who Goes There?"  In the story, scientific researchers in Antarctica stumble a spaceship, deep-frozen in the ice for untold millennia.  They foolishly unthaw its pilot, learning too late that the alien is a shape-shifter with a taste for people, preferably uncooked.

Isaac Asimov, a likeable but rather immodest expert on every subject known to man and major science fact and science fiction writer in his own right, eventually parted company with Campbell.  He was deeply pained by the editor's increasing fascination with Dianetics and any number of pseudo-scientific devices whose inventors claimed would invalidate the basic laws of physics.  More painful to Asimov was John W Campbell's strident defense of the pre-Civil War South and argument that slavery might be the most "natural" state for blacks.  Eventually, other major talents of the genre stopped sending stories to Astounding as Campbell's editorials turned into little more than anti-socialist rants and arguments that cigarette smoking could not be linked to cancer but could be shown to increase one's ability to think clearly and rationally.]

Johnny Weissmuller and Eleanor Holm take a break
between performances at the Aquacade attraction

Perhaps easier for the average visitor to understand was Billy Rose's Aquacade where Olympians Johnny Weissmuller and Eleanor Holm dove into pools and swam gracefully through the water.  (They would later be replaced by Buster "Flash Gordon" Crabbe and a newcomer named Esther Williams.)  Even gossip-lovers got something out of the princely eighty cents they paid to see the Aquacade.  Rose was married to the famous comedienne Fannie Brice.  Or should we say he was married to Fannie until he met lovely and liquor-loving Eleanor... 

1939 World's Fair Promotional Poster

For more about the 1939 World's Fair:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/engineering/architecture/4345790

http://www.nytimes.com/specials/magazine3/1939.html

NEWS CORRAL:

A commission examining the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan concludes, painfully, that basic cultural dynamics in Japanese culture contributed significantly to the nation's nightmare.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/05/world/asia/japan-fukushima-report/index.html?eref=rss_topstories&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fcnn_topstories+%28RSS%3A+Top+Stories%29

LRNARTS MARKETPLACE

Artwork by Louis R Nugent now available:  For fine art prints and greeting cards, visit:

http://louis-nugent.artistwebsites.com/

Featured this week:

Fine Art America now features West Texas painting, drawings, and photographs by Karen Slagle of Amarillo, Texas,  Linda Cox of Graham, Texas, Suzanne Girard Theis of Houston, Texas, Judi Bagwell of Greenwell Springs, Louisiana, Karen Boudreaux of Houston, Texas, Joe JAKE Pratt of Kerrville, Texas, David Pike of Lubbock, Texas, Ken Brown Pioneer of Sand Springs, Oklahoma, and Louis R Nugent of San Angelo, Texas at:

 http://fineartamerica.com/groups/west-texas.html?tab=overview

This week's featured artist: Joe JAKE Pratt

CREDITS

Note: All photographs and other images for this essay were located through Google Images or Wikipedia, without authoritative source or ownership information except as noted: 1939 New York World's Fair at Night and National Cash Register Exhibit from wired.com; Dream of Venus, Taxi Rider by Salvador Dali and Dali With Head from qwriting.org, Trylon and Perisphere Behind Statues, Trylon and Perisphere At Night and Four Freedoms Sculptures by Leo Friedlander from 1939nyworld'sfair.com; RCA Phantom TRK-12 Television from cedmagic.com; Latin Dancers from photoessayist.com; World's Fair Postcard from sjsu.edu; Micromegas by Frank Paul from carnegiemuseums.org; 1939 New York World's Fair Poster from zazzle.com; World's Fair Goblin with cover art by James Bama from Bantam Books; 1939 World's Fair Stamp by Louis Nugent and available through fineartamerica.com