SHOULD YOU DESIRE to escape the din of daily life and decompress by soaking up the local culture of a quaint, quiet village or town in France, here’s a pro tip: Stay away from churches.
To be clear, I’m not advising you against visiting or patronizing a place of religious worship. But if you enjoy sleeping in on vacation, beware that these houses of the holy contain bell towers, or what can easily be described as the world’s largest alarm clocks.
Turn sound on: The bell tower of the church of Ste. Thérèse ringing out in Rennes, France
As a seasoned traveler who is also a light sleeper, I have an exhaustive list of places to avoid when securing lodging: busy streets and intersections, hospitals, fire departments, sports stadiums, bars and clubs. But until now, “church bells” was not on the list.
In France, there are somewhere around 45,000 places of worship, most of them of the Catholic persuasion. The overwhelming majority of these temples possess a lofty tower where a hefty tube of cast bronze is suspended. And when that metal-alloy cylinder is struck with what is known as a clapper, the reverberation can be heard and the resonance felt for great distances.
Moreover, the knell of the bell is not a rare event. Every occasion seems to warrant a clanging. They chime to announce the hour. They toll vigorously to recruit parishioners for services, of which there are many throughout the week, especially on Sunday. They peal excitedly for what seems hours on end to honor a multitude of saints on the days of their birth or their martyrdom.1
On the town
WE ARE TEMPORARILY residing in the city of Rennes, France, situated at the confluence of the Ille and Vilaine rivers, which drain into the Bay of Biscay and the Atlantic Ocean some 100 Km to the southwest. The weather here is mild, often overcast and sometimes rainy, as is typical of a coastal town.
Front view of Church of Ste. Thérèse
This city is the administrative capital or prefecture of Brittany. And although Rennes boasts a population of nearly 750,000 in the greater metropolis, it’s really more of an aggregation of tiny villages and neighborhoods, many with the requisite cobblestone streets, provincial-style residences and small shops (which seem to be closed most of the time). There are also many modern apartment buildings and offices. This city even has a subway system. But in general, the place feels unhurried, relaxed, low-key.
The city of Rennes, France, along the Vilaine River.
In our little quiet neighborhood, we may hear magpies, crows, seagulls, pigeons and an occasional backyard dog voicing objection to its aerial companions. Cars, trains and the usual hub-bub of city life are barely audible. We rarely detect jets overhead, even though there is a regional airport just six or so kilometers away.
And then this serenity is interrupted by the ding-donging.
We are across the street from the Eglise de Sainte Thérèse, an impressive neo-Gothic structure built about 100 years ago. They spared no expense on the bell towers. And whatever that cost was, they have gotten their money’s worth. From 8 a.m. until 8 p.m., they ring on the hour. (Occasionally, however, someone might lose count. )
A view from our apartment of Rennes, France. The flat terrain allows ringing bells to be heard at great distances.
For religious services, there is a preamble — a warning of sorts — of three sets of three rings. And then, after a brief interlude, all hell’s bells break loose. This carillon2 cacophony may endure for ten or fifteen minutes. For the musicians reading this, I detect four tones: 1. The tonic, 2. A major second, 3. A major third, 4. An octave. If you remember singing class in school, this would be DO-RE-MI-DO.
Every neighborhood has its own church with its own bell tower. Because the terrain is flat, the sound carries unimpeded. Frequently, not just one, but as many as three or four churches nearby compete for attention with Sainte Thérèse.
All this chiming got me to thinking how this tradition got started and, perhaps more to the point, why this anachronism persists.
Hear ye, hear ye
LOUD SOUNDS HAVE BEEN used to communicate for just about as long as humans have been assembling in social groups. Whether its a conch shell or a drum, any reverberation that can carry for long distances has been used to convey a warning (enemy is approaching), or perhaps an invitation (festival tonight to celebrate the solstice).
Once organized religion became commonplace, trumpets, gongs and other such instruments were used to invite the masses to, well, Mass. It wasn’t until 604 A.D. that a Pope Sabinian sanctioned bells as the most effective method of communication.3 And the rest, as they say, is history.
The question, though, is why continue? In this day and age, we certainly don’t need any reminder of the time of day. And, let’s face it, the bell-ringers are not going to be as accurate as a smartphone clock, which is synchronized over the air with an atomic timekeeper (located in some secret bunker in the Colorado mountains) right down to the millisecond.
As for the announcements of religious services, wouldn’t a group text be more effective? (Add a link to a Patreon page to skip the fund-raising basket that’s passed from pew to pew during services.)
In fact, all this ringing can unequivocally be defined as noise pollution. Studies in Switzerland and the Netherlands have concluded just this. But tradition is strong here in the land of the Gauls, and it is unlikely the musical tones emanating loudly and clearly through villages, towns and cities will be silenced by some silly, modern notion of what constitutes clangour.4
So I, consequently, have developed my own tradition to cope when the boisterous bells erupt, which is to mutter under my breath: “Off with their heads!”
FOOTNOTES
France boasts 1,376 Catholic saints, of which 656 died as martyrs. ↩︎
Carillon is derived from Old French quarregnon, which means the peal of four bells. ↩︎
Pope Sabinian was only in charge for two years, but he certainly achieved a rather notorious kind of immortality with his bell-ringing decision. ↩︎
Clangour is defined as a loud non-musical noise made by a banging or ringing sound. ↩︎
Perhaps today’s troubles began with who signed the Declaration of Independence
ON JULY 4, 249 YEARS AGO, 56 white men got together in the city of Brotherly Love to sign a not-so-loving letter to their absentee landlord informing him that they didn’t like the way he was running the place, so they were going co-op.
The recipient of the letter was Great Britain’s King George III. The men assembled in Philadelphia were an elite class of lawyers, doctors, merchants, and plantation owners who were aspiring to wrest control of the 13 original colonies.1 These guys were America’s first aristocracy, or what would be today’s “1 percent.”
Only two or three of the signers came from humble origins, most significantly Benjamin Franklin, who worked his way up and out of indentured servitude as a child.2
Of the signers, 45 were affluent landowners. These included Thomas Jefferson, who owned 5,000 acres and Richard Henry Lee (great-uncle of the infamous Robert E. Lee), who was the largest landowner of the group, with 20,000 acres. Most of the signers — as many as 40 — inherited their wealth.
These men, known as the Founding Fathers, represented the upper class of this era who made up 10 percent of the population but controlled between 50 to 70 percent of the land.
The prize goes to the Van Renssalaer family, which controlled 1 million acres in New York.
Of the signers, 41 were slaveholders, including Jefferson, who was at the time subjecting 600 people to captivity and forced labor while avowing equality for all. He took one of these slaves, Sally Hemmings, with him to Paris at the age of 14 and she would soon thereafter bear his child as a child herself.3
George Washington, also a plantation owner and slave-owner, didn’t sign the Declaration because he was out of town running the Revolutionary Army. Washington accepted the position as general of the colonial military at least in part because he felt snubbed by King George III. Washington believed he was deserving of a commissioned officer’s title for his role in the so-called French and Indian War.4 Said commission was never granted and the nation’s first leader bore a grudge, which is all that is needed these days for a rich white man to assume the highest office.
Washington inherited a respectable fortune of 2,500 acres and 30 or so slaves, but had a bit of an inferiority complex, which may have been part of his motivation for marrying up. Martha Washington, née Dandridge, was a widow and one of the richest individuals in Virginia. Matrimony conveniently increased Washington’s income tenfold.5
What all the complaining was about
WHAT WE REMEMBER MOST about the the 27 grievances in the Declaration of Independence is No. 17, which is etched into every American schoolchild’s skull as the catchy phrase: “No taxation without representation!”
This was certainly a concern, but paled in comparison to the charges of political oppression, military tyranny, judicial injustice, economic oppression, and willful neglect of the individual states.
It would not be difficult to match each of the 27 complaints then with similar charges lodged against the current despot ruler of the United States. Just to highlight some of the originals with their modern-day doppelgangers:
No. 9:Making judges dependent on his will alone
No. 10:Sending officers to harass civilians
No. 12:Rendering the military above civilian power
No. 14:Quartering troops among civilian populations6
No. 18: Denying trial by jury
No. 19: Abducting and shipping civilians overseas for pretended offenses
No. 27:Exciting domestic insurrection
These illustrate precisely why the Founding Fathers wrote the document in the first place and why they then undertook a multiyear battle to become independent.
A most telling omission
ANOTHER PHRASE THAT HAS BEEN indelibly pressed into the American lexicon is that “all men are created equal.” Yet, even while writing this in the Declaration’s introduction, the Founding Fathers knew it was hypocritical to exclude slavery from the narrative.
Jefferson, to his credit, did try to blame the king for America’s system of subjugation. Almost immediately, though, what would have been a 28th grievance was stricken. The south, of course, was dependent on slavery and had no economic motive to change their business model. Apparently the Christian Golden Rule to “do unto others as you would have others do unto you” did not weigh on their consciences. So calling out England for a system the Southern Colonies had no intention of eliminating was just silly. They were also no doubt acutely aware of the growing anti-slavery movement in the Kingdom of Great Britain.7
Washington, according to folklore, could not tell a lie, but he was not above looking the other way. He privately made it known that he thought slavery should be abolished, but in a phased out approach, preferably after he was long gone.8
None of the 13 colonies at the time considered slave-owning illegal. It wasn’t as pronounced in the north for economic reasons mostly. The south’s economy was dependent on large crops such as tobacco and cotton that required large amounts of manual labor. The north was made up of smaller farms and trades, such as ship-building, metal-working, milling, and printing, and the maritime industries of fishing and whaling. Especially for the trades in the north, free labor was readily available in the form of indentured servitude, in which kids were sent to work without pay to learn a craft. After five or seven years, they might earn their freedom.
Putting pen to paper: 56 men signed the Declaration of Independence.
The “all men are created equal” clause in the Declaration is taught to students to mean all people, but that, of course, was not how the Founding Fathers meant it. They would later clarify this by establishing in the Constitution that black men were equal to three-fifths of a white man. It was no oversight that women were excluded altogether since married women at the time were considered the legal property of their husbands. Indigenous people were not considered at all and described as “savages.”
A little thought experiment
IMAGINE FOR A MOMENT that on that balmy day in July 1776 it was not just wealthy white men who congregated to “form a more perfect union.”9 What if, in a moment of true enlightenment, those distinguished 56 gentlemen sought the input of people such as Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea), a Mohawk leader fluent in English who had actually held court with King George and who was a skilled negotiator among the Iroquois, colonialists and British. What if William Lee, Washington’s black valet and confidante, had been asked for his input? Or perhaps Prince Hall, a black soldier who joined the charge of Bunker Hill and was a leading advocate for the rights of his people?
Or what if Abigail Adams, a feminist ahead of her time, held an equal voice at the table alongside her husband John? How about if enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley, who challenged the stereotype of her people, had also been asked to speak?
What do you suppose the Declaration of Independence, and later the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, might have looked like had they been written by an assembly truly representative of all the people at the time?
Of course, we can only speculate. But we can do more than that when we scrutinize the output of the 56 men who were there. They were certainly successful in laying the groundwork for freeing the fledgling nation from a far-away monarchy. But the system they put into place was, when viewed from a truly objective perspective, not altogether that different.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss
TODAY, CITIZENS ARE MARCHING in the street chanting “No Kings,” which is a proxy for “We’re not going back to an autocracy.” But, ironically, King George III’s powers back then were limited. The British already had a parliamentary form of government. It was that legislative body that voted to pass onerous laws on taxation in the states, that managed the states’ trade with England, that held the “power of the purse,” controlling spending for all the government’s affairs, including the military. They also collectively decided the governors of each state.
And even though the king was the recipient of the Declaration, there was a strong sentiment among the Founding Fathers that it was parliament, not the king, that had overstepped its authoritative line. The original idea for revolting was to circumvent that British legislature and remain loyal to the king, essentially just cutting out the “middle man.” Franklin was an early proponent of this strategy. 10
Moreover, monarchies were beginning their final chapter in Europe. The Western World was rapidly moving to a political-economic system based on capitalism, where money, rather than bloodline and inheritance, equaled power. It was the new system taking over the old, a system that required insatiable growth through the exploitation of “new” lands and the occupants therein.
The name of the socio-economic model got re-branded from parliamentary monarchy to democracy, but it was pretty much the same thing. And the result was the same as well: One colonizing empire swapped out for another. It was still rich white men running the world, co-mingling their personal financial interests with the public’s interest. If you write the rules for the game of government, and can change the rules whenever you want, you will always win. Money buys power and power is the root of all evil, especially in politics.
That is why the type of “equality” laid out in the Declaration holds pretty true today, where 63% of U.S. senators are white men, despite being only 29% of the population, where more than half of all Congressional members are millionaires. Today, 30% of the wealth in the U.S. is concentrated in the hands of 1 percent of the population, of which 90 percent are white and mostly male. And these are the people that pour obscene billions into lobbies and elections to get what they want. And when they get what they want, they want more.
The Founding Fathers undoubtedly considered their work to be sowing the seeds of democracy, but what they actually planted was the root of unfettered capitalism, a root that took hold and propagated like an invasive species, one that is all but impossible to weed out today.
All of this is to say that the Founding Fathers’ dream came true, just not the way it is taught in elementary school.
FOOTNOTES
The 13 original colonies were: Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, and Virginia. ↩︎
Franklin started his career at the age of 12, assigned to a 9-year indentured-servitude contract as a printer’s apprentice, under the ownership of his own brother. ↩︎
To Hemming’s credit, while in Paris, where slavery was illegal, she negotiated with Jefferson that she would only return to the United States in exchange for extraordinary privileges compared to the other slaves at the time. Jefferson conceded. She went on to bear four of his children. SOURCE: Monticello.org.↩︎
Source: Peter Stark, Sins of the Founding Fathers↩︎
The actual size of the combined estate of Martha and George Washington is a bit difficult to ascertain, since her fortune was tied to her previous husband. George Washington took control of those affairs, but could not legally own them outright. Nonetheless, his wealth increased about tenfold as a result of their marriage. ↩︎
This grievance is generally interpreted to mean a complaint in which soldiers had the right to sleep in civilian homes. But U.S. marines in tents in California cities at the time of this writing has an equally threatening effect. ↩︎
Slavery would be abolished in the British Empire in 1833, although one could argue that it survived in other forms of involuntary servitude. ↩︎
In his will, Washington stated that all his slaves should be freed after Martha’s death. But Martha decided to free them immediately after George’s death, because she feared the slaves might simply kill her to obtain their freedom. Source: mountvernon.org. ↩︎
This is written in the preamble to the U.S. Constitution of 1787. ↩︎
The Royalist Revolution, Monarchy and the American Founding, by Eric Nelson. ↩︎
TODAY, I ACCOMPLISHED AN AMAZING FEAT without even trying. I completed 70 repetitions on the Solar Elliptical Circuit. Yeah, just finished. Going to take a well-deserved nap and then start on 71.
Image of Earth and its moon taken from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, at a distance of 142 million kilometers. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
If that’s not impressive enough, consider this: I am now officially a member of the Trillion Kilometer Club, having earned the distinction when I surpassed that distance as a traveler through space aboard the good ship Mother Earth. I took the scenic route just to rack up more frequent flier points.
You, too, are hitchhiking a little ride through the galaxy, without a guide, I might add.1 But enough about you; it’s my birthday and what I want to delve into is the relationship between time and space and how time flies, except to a common housefly, who doesn’t see time fly by, though the fly can certainly fly.
If you are not thoroughly confused yet, I suggest you continue reading and I’ll do my best to get you there.
Acting my age
YES, I’VE BEEN ALIVE A LONG time. I am now older than the Pope. I didn’t see that one coming. Nor did I ever expect the Pope to be a guy from Chicago named Bob, but I digress. If I really want to feel like I have been occupying Earth for a very long stay, though, I look to the average housefly.
I’ve been thinking about these unwanted creatures as of late because we are residing in a cozy flat in London, where the weather has been uncharacteristically warm and this being Europe, our only source of ventilation is open windows, which have no screens. This provides our friends musca domestica easy access to our abode. Despite being informed that they are very much not welcomed here, they continue to come and go as they please. Maybe they don’t understand “shoo!” in my American accent.
The only redeeming quality of these winged nuisances is that they live but a few short weeks. So I can gloat that I have outlasted any member of this insect family by a factor of 1,100 to one.2 Compared to them, I have been in existence for eons. But, as the saying goes, there’s always two sides to the story.
A different point of view
FROM THE FLY’S PERSPECTIVE, my way of viewing the time-space continuum is obviously lacking.
That’s because this little insect has vastly superior optic sensors, compared to a human’s.
A human’s eyes scan at the rate of about 60 hertz, which means that in one second we are seeing 60 separate, sequential flashes of light as it reflects off objects into our field of vision. But a fly scrutinizes its surroundings at a refresh rate of between 250 to 400 times per second.
The higher scanning rate means that to the fly, paradoxically, time moves more slowly than it does to humans.
This is why it’s so darn difficult to nail one of these guys. When you extend your arm with a swatter in hand and swing at that unwanted visitor perched on the window sill, you see your action as a blur of motion. With your wrist and your elbow acting as a compound fulcrum, the flat surface of the fly swatter is being leveraged to move at almost 100 kilometers per hour. But to that little speck of an organism, you are reenacting a slo-mo replay of a batter striking out at the World Series. You think you almost had the bugger, but it is actually observing you approaching at a snail’s pace and, biding its sweet time, the critter nonchalantly performs an acrobatic airlift-evacuation out of the strike zone.
While the speed of the world appears to be dragging to that miniature entity in an exoskeleton, its brain is actually operating at a very rapid rate. Compared to a human, the information gleaned from the fly’s vision is analyzed nearly instantaneously. Part of that is bio-mechanics. The neurons have a shorter distance to travel,3 allowing the information from its eyes to reach the processing unit, aka the brain, more quickly. So the entire cycle — information input, computing, then firing of neurons — triggers a near-instant reflex.
A minute in the life of a human brain
THE FLY HAS ANOTHER ADVANTAGE. Its minuscule brain (a millionth the size of a human’s) is unencumbered by all the cross-channel talk, the ambient noise that is rattling around and interfering with the signal of electrical impulses that are pulsating through the frontal, parietal, temporal and occipital lobes inside our skulls. We are thinking about the past, the present and the future, usually all at once and muddled with emotions — regret, ambition, anxiety, anger, surprise, sadness, love, grief, and fear among others– when we should be trying to focus on being in the moment.
For example, imagine you are stuck in stop-and-go traffic while on a conference call because last quarter’s numbers were down and now your boss is rambling on about another reorg and of course replacing everybody with AI and you are wondering why you are even trying to keep your job maybe now is the time to open that studio in the Andes where you can teach dance to little Peruvian children — did you just think “children?” Oh geez you are late picking up your own kid you know something’s going on with them they are at that age but this could be something else should you send them to a doctor and if so what kind of doctor and — look out! That guy is obviously texting. Idiot. Jesus! — You mean the guy is an idiot, not Jesus — Doctors what about them did you or did you not already pay that $1,250 deductible to the hospital can’t believe it for just an outpatient procedure to remove a tiny benign mole what good is health insurance anyway premiums always going up better keep the job though just for the insurance — The Andes some little Peruvian village like that one in the David Attenborough special he is such a treasure you just want to be anywhere other than in this traffic do you even remember a plié from a pirouette? — Look out for that guy in the Camaro weaving in and out like he’s going to win some race — we’re all stuck in this traffic buddy — he thinks he’s special everybody thinks they’re special — Oh, what to do about dinner are you really going to see family for Thanksgiving you know how that will end whose turn is it to cook tonight should you pick something up you just missed the exit for Whole Foods well you have to get off in two exits to pick up the kid, did you forget, again? — You are a good person and a good parent, aren’t you? Of course you are. Yes, you are, at least you try that’s what’s important. Did your very best friend really say at lunch you should maybe switch to a different therapist what a thing to say, weird — Uh oh there’s the exit maybe you can still make it nope whoa nope — wow, that was close, focus, focus — yeah everybody quit your honking gotta get out, just let me get off yeah I get it you’re pissed OK got it. Jesus. People. What is with them. Your back hurts who designs these car seats they’re made for chimpanzees not humans.
Indeed, the fly has none of that stuff going on in its noggin so the little guy can just relax and when necessary react, all by reflex. Lickety-split.
Time is qualitatively relative, according to Einstein, sort of
THE FLY’S LIFE IS ABOUT QUALITY, not quantity. In just 28 days, this tiny being goes through four stages from egg, to larva, to pupa and then adult.
Day twenty-eight is the culmination of a fulfilling life. By the end they are wistfully reminiscing about the crazy things they did as pupae and how did they even make it to adulthood? Seems so long ago, now. And it would seem long ago to you, too, if you viewed the entire world at the pace of a Powerpoint™ presentation. Dear God, next slide, PLEASE.
This perspective is a nice twist on Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. The relativity part is just that: Time is relative to the observer, based on the observer’s motion through space.
Einstein’s explained his most famous theory with a description of a bolt of lightning striking a train and how it might appear at different times to two people based on their positions and movement. Photo by Doris Ulmann. Creative Commons license.
Fun fact: Flies love life. Sure, they have some work to do propagating their species, laying or fertilizing eggs, and of course watching out for predators, but other than they are thoroughly enjoying themselves. That’s why they are always buzzing with excitement and I have the empirical evidence to prove my assertion.
Now, at this point, you may be questioning my authoritative proclamations in the field of etymology or entomology, whichever of those has to do with insects. True, I’m no scientist, but my cousin was and so I think I’m qualified in today’s government to run pretty much anything from NASA to the NIH. But I digress.
Anyway, the reason flies buzz with excitement is very simple: Everything smells and tastes great!4 And, of course, I mean EVERYTHING.
So what’s not to like when you’re a fly? We are repulsed at the thought of some lowly bug having such an unrefined palate, but that’s just how we humans are, always looking at the world as though it revolves around us, despite being schooled by Copernicus hundreds of years ago to the contrary. We wallow in denial while the fly is just eating up life. And then it dies. But what a life, right? That’s what all that buzzing is about.
We are evolution’s latecomers
SHORT THE FLY’S LIFE APPEARS TO US, but that is just another human judgment. As I think about it now, I’m being very egocentric in just comparing my individual life to be worth more than one thousand generations of these insects.
That’s because members of musca domestica have been gracing the earth for 65 million years. Homo sapiens entered the picture just 300,000 years ago.Compared to flies, we are maybe in the larval stage of evolution.
Flies, as I mentioned, are not burdened with all the crazy thoughts going through our brains. But if they could think, they would undoubtedly wonder why it is that after being on this planet for so long without a care in the world they were invaded by this ugly bipedal beast that seems compelled to continually thrust one of its giant limbs at them in very slow motion. And, undoubtedly, they would find that very annoying and maybe decide to put together some type of eradication program. What to use? Hepatitis, typhoid, cholera might come to their diminutive minds.
Let’s do some fun math (yes, that is a thing)
OUR WAY OF MEASURING TIME is at once arbitrary, parochial and one-dimensional.
We are gauging our existence based on our travels aboard one watery orb as it completes one ellipse around an incandescent fireball. We mark that complete orbit as a unit of time we call a year.
We are traveling in multiple cosmic planes all at once.
But we are actually advancing in four distinct directions across the x,y, and z axes (height, width and depth) all at once. First, we are zipping around as the earth itself rotates. While we move in that circular motion, we are also orbiting the sun. Meanwhile, the sun itself is completing its own 240-million-year spin around our galactic neighborhood we call the Milky Way, and it’s dragging the entire solar system along for the ride. And finally, the Milky Way is spiraling around a black hole. So we are moving in multiple directions simultaneously. Makes me dizzy just thinking about it, never mind doing it. If you really want to be a daredevil, you can add a fifth cosmic plane just by, well, jumping out of an airplane.5
So here’s how a 70-year-old human achieves the Trillion Kilometer Club:6
Earth’s rotation for 365 days X 70 years = 1.025 billion Km
Earth’s orbit around the sun X 70 years = 65.8 billion Km
Sun’s orbit around the Milky Way = 441.8 billion Km
Milky Way’s spiral around a black hole = 866.9 billion Km
Grand total = 1.376 trillion kilometers
That’s why measuring time based on just the one dimension of Earth’s orbit around the sun is pretty silly if you ask me.
And here’s a fun thought: As you will notice from the numbers above, we’re going faster in each of those cosmic planes until we get to the Milky Way, which is spinning at .07% of the speed of light. As we approach the speed of light, time decelerates. This phenomenon neatly parallels the fly’s paradox, in which its vision –viewing the world at a higher scanning rate — creates an impression of time slowing down.
The sun, by the way, is just one of about 400 billion stars in our galaxy and our little heat pump is in a rather remote location at that. There may be 2 trillion or so galaxies in the universe. So 2 trillion times 400 billion is … well, let’s just say it’s a pretty big number.7 All that inter-spinning and gravitational pull and there are black holes creating a warp in the space-time fabric and now scientists think time can go backwards. So what does a “year” really have to do with anything?
Our measurement of time is subjective, but it gives us humans comfort, a sense of relevance. Some folks, as they reach my age, like to console themselves by saying “70 is the new 60.” But I prefer another aphorism: “You’re only as old as you feel.” And I feel old. I’ve got the typical aches and pains to prove it.
But I’m not that old when compared to the universe, which in a blaze of light blasted into reality some 13.8 billion years ago. My time on Earth is only .0000000005 percent of the existence of our universe,8 which means I have been around for only a very, very, very small fraction of all that has happened.
From that perspective, I feel like someone who arrives at some shindig a little late and then blurts out: “What did I miss? Let’s get this party started!”
Approximation. If the average fly lives three weeks, then the math would be (52/3) X 70 = 1,213. If we use 4 weeks, then the math is (52/4) X 70 = 910. So I’m splitting the difference at 1,100. ↩︎
Neurons, which move through nerves, are actually slow travelers when compared to electrons zipping through a copper wire. ↩︎
Flies do not possess an olfactory organ or taste buds, of course. They use tiny sensilla, or hairs, that cover their body to do the equivalent of smelling and use tiny organs on their feet for tasting. ↩︎
Technically, just moving in any direction will provide you with the Fifth Cosmic Plane, which sounds like a recently discovered bootleg album by Pink Floyd from the 1970s. ↩︎
The details on those calculations were computed using perplexity.ai and are as follows: 1. Earth’s Rotation At the equator, Earth spins at 1,670 km/h. Over 70 years: Distance = Speed × Time = 1,670 km/h × 24 hours/day × 365.25 days/year × 70 years = 1.025 billion km. 2. Earth’s Orbit Around the Sun Earth travels 940 million km/year in its orbit: Total distance = 940,000,000 km/year × 70 years = 65.8 billion km. 3. Sun’s Motion Through the Milky Way The Sun moves at 720,000 km/h relative to the galaxy: Total distance = 720,000 km/h × 24 hours/day × 365.25 days/year × 70 years = 441.8 billion km. 4. Milky Way’s Galactic Rotation The Milky Way rotates once every ~240 million years, and the Sun orbits the galactic center at ~720,000 km/h. Using the galaxy’s diameter (100,000 light-years ≈ 9.461×10¹⁷ km) and its rotation fraction over 70 years: Circumference = π × diameter ≈ 2.973×10¹⁸ km Distance traveled = Circumference × (70 / 240,000,000) = 866.9 billion km. Total Distance Traveled Summing all components: 1.025B km (rotation) + 65.8B km (orbit) + 441.8B km (Sun’s motion) + 866.9B km (galactic rotation) = ≈1.375 trillion km (1.375×10¹² km). ↩︎
That would equal 80 quintillion stars. This is estimated to be 10 times the number of grains of sand on Earth. ↩︎
The Tesla brand is in meltdown and the moral of the story is worthy of an Aesop fable
LET ME TELL YOU A TALE and it’s a good one. It’s about a Boy Genius who came to a place known as the Land of Opportunity and thanks to his privileged heritage he rose quickly to a prominent position and was then able to convince the Smart People of the Land of Opportunity that he was going to create a new kind of car that could help humanity and at no extra charge save the entire world. He built the car and he sold many of them, because the Smart People really, really believed in his vision and the cars were pretty sporty.
The Tesla brand is in meltdown mode, thanks to Elon Musk’s inability to understand the Golden Rule of Business: Know Thy Customer.
He had the Midas touch.
He then erected and launched rockets and said, “Saving Earth is cool and all but why not invade some other planets? That would be cooler.” And the Smart People thought, “Well, he did build that car. And now these rockets. He is superhuman. We should listen to him some more.” And they did. And he became the richest Boy Genius in the world.
And then things got weird, or rather the Boy Genius got weird. Very weird. He became addicted to his power, fame and fortune and many, many pharmaceuticals. And then he not only joined but became a leading proponent of the Vile Movement.
The Vile Movement was everything the Smart People did not like. This made it clear to the Smart People that the Boy Genius didn’t mean any of that stuff about saving the world or helping anybody but himself. All he was doing was using the money that he got from the Smart People to finance causes that would destroy everything they believed in.
And that’s when his Midas touch backfired. That’s when he realized he could not eat his gold. You see, these Smart People became very angry. Many unloaded their cars. Some plastered bumper stickers making it clear they hated this Boy Genius despite owning the car. Protestors took to the streets. His company went into what the Boy Genius might describe as a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.” That’s a nice way of saying it imploded.
The Boy Genius earnestly and without a hint of irony asked: “Why are people so mean?” And then he announced that he would get back to making stuff, really cool stuff that nobody but he — the Boy Genius — could make. But the Smart People who bought his cars and had supported his vision didn’t believe him anymore, because the Smart People now realized he was not a genius, he was just a boy like the one who craved attention so badly he cried “wolf” too many times. The Boy Genius was just someone who could never be trusted again.
Will the Boy Genius rise from the ashes like Phoenix or better yet save his own company like Steve Jobs?1
Stay tuned for next week’s episode!
To be honest, no one knows just yet, so don’t expect a subsequent installment. But I do think I know what the moral of the story is and it is worthy of an Aesop fable.
I bought the vision with U.S. dollars
I MIGHT AS WELL ADMIT IT it right up front: I was sold the first time I rode in a Tesla. It was 2014 and a colleague of mine offered a ride to some meeting in San Francisco. As he hit the pedal, the torque threw my head into the headrest. It was exhilarating. We zipped through traffic on 101 North as he regaled me with stories about over-the-air updates. “It’s just an iPhone with wheels,” he said, as the autopilot app merged us into the left lane.
It was cool. It was unlike anything else on the road. And it was a unique approach to using renewable energy. A luxury vehicle that rode you around in style and saved the environment. What’s not to like?
At the time of this little excursion, I had spent just over 20 years in Silicon Valley. And, to be honest, I was jaded. I had seen lots of technologies come and go. The pattern was abundantly clear to me: A New Shiny Thing appeared and promised to disrupt some big bad legacy industry and in the process the New Shiny Thing would make the world a better place for all.
That was the promise of the World Wide Web, social media, business intelligence, the cloud, you name it. All we got out of it was the likes of Google, Facebook, and Amazon scraping our private data and harnessing our very personal proclivities for fun and profit.
Tesla checked all the boxes to qualify as the New Shiny Thing and then some. It wasn’t just disrupting the auto industry, it was upending the entire power grid as well by creating a new model for the production and consumption of renewable energy.
I watched with amusement as auto execs scrambled to join the EV parade and as the PG&Es and ConEds of the world struggled to adapt their monopolies to a distributed energy network that they couldn’t control.
All of that was impressive. But what really sold me was the Tesla mission statement to transition the world to renewable energy. It was based on a manifesto supposedly written by Elon Musk himself.
Funky AI image, but the sentiment is real for many Tesla owners.
And so that glimmering, shimmering object, that silvery emblem with a “T” was the lure that caught my eye. And despite my experience-based cynicism, this time I bit: hook, line and sinker.
I even chuckled to myself that I had missed a golden opportunity with Musk years before.
A kid named Elon who wasn’t kidding
HE WAS JUST ANOTHER 20-something nerd, one with a prematurely receding hairline and a latent outbreak of acne, when I met him in 1996. He had called me up and asked for a meeting. At the time, I was running the Java Developer Ecosystem at Sun Microsystems. My voice mail and email were clogged with similar requests because Java, a programming language invented by James Gosling, was fortuitously just the right platform for Internet-based applications. Java was red hot. Every start-up in a garage had an idea for the next big thing using Java.
But Musk was quite persistent and so I did meet with him, and his brother — Gimbel, Gumball or something like that. It has come to light recently that the two Musk boys had overstayed their visas in the United States around this time. So, apparently, I bought breakfast for two illegal aliens and then listened to their pitch. (Please do not tell ICE.)
Elon did all the talking. His patter was fast and his Afrikaans accent was thick. All I could glean from his running monolog was that he wanted to sell his company, called Zip2. Naturally, I assumed the enterprise had something to do with replacing snail mail with email, which had already been done. But it turns out Zip2 was even more boring: It was just online classified ads. And he never once mentioned how Java fit in. So I passed on the opportunity.
But now, here he was, 18 years later in 2014, proving me wrong. He had sold Zip2 for a tidy sum, started another company that got acquired by PayPal, which then got gobbled up by eBay. He cashed out and funneled those funds into Tesla, where he financially elbowed his way into the CEO position. He turned out to be the Boy Genius after all. I wondered how I could have gotten him so wrong.
Shortly thereafter in 2015, I had the chance to meet J.B. Straubel, one of the founders of Tesla. That’s when I learned who was the technical mastermind behind much of the company’s technology and operations. It was Straubel who invented the battery cell design that was the breakthrough for electric vehicles, giving them the range of gas-powered cars.
Straubel was the guy behind new manufacturing processes, including the Gigafactory. And he created a whole new market with another idea: the PowerWall.
Bumper stickers for sale on Etsy. The anti-Musk movement is worldwide.
So, I thought, Musk was the prancing show horse, Straubel the diligent — but brilliant — work horse. This was not an uncommon arrangement in Silicon Valley. Behind every Steve Jobs, usually there was a Steve Wozniak. This just reinforced my appreciation for what Tesla was doing.
In the following months, I wrote several positive pieces about the company in my blog and in CIO magazine. And then, starting in 2017, I went fan boy. I ended up buying the whole package: First the solar panels, then a Tesla Model 3 Long Range, then the Powerwall II. I signed up for Starlink beta as soon as it was available. I bought Tesla stock.
Today, I own none of those things. And I am just one of perhaps hundreds of thousands of formerly loyal customers who have shed all their Tesla assets in direct protest against Musk.
He never saw it coming, and still doesn’t understand why
HONESTLY, I WAS AS SURPRISED as many other FTOs — Former Tesla Owners — at how quickly the anti-Musk movement achieved its formidable momentum. That surprise was not without a tinge of schadenfreude.
But, I am reasonably sure, no one was more shocked than Musk himself. I think I know why there was such animosity from the FTOs toward Musk, and why he can’t comprehend what is happening.
What Musk — who believes that empathy is a weakness — either forgot or never learned was the Golden Rule of Business:
Know Thy Customer
I’m going to profile the Tesla buyer, of which I was one. We are mostly Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers with a decent chunk of disposable income. We are educated and liberal. We are technically savvy. We voted for Hillary even though Bernie was the better choice. We voted for Kamala even though we are inspired by AOC.
We take climate change seriously.
We advocate for equal rights for all people, regardless of ethnicity, color, sexual orientation or religious beliefs.
We make fact-based decisions. We trust science.
We started Earth Day. We lobbied worldwide for fixing the ozone and it worked. We bought into recycling, organic foods, renewable energy, hybrids. Some of us were hippies, and then yuppies. We abandoned organized religion and leaned into New Age with Buddhism and meditation. And then we became parents and then grandparents who only want a better place for our kids and grandkids.
The anti-Musk vitriol being expressed now reminds me of another story, this one from Aesop, titled “The Farmer and the Viper.”
A farmer finds a viper outside in the freezing cold and decides to be kind to the animal, so he takes it inside. After the viper warms up, the snake bites the farmer.
Moral of the story: Don’t be kind to Evil.
Tesla buyers, at the risk of stating the obvious, are the farmer in this fable. We thought we were doing the right thing helping the viper. But we learned our lesson. We have banished the viper from the house because we absolutely do not want to be kind to Evil.
Once bitten, never again
SO WHEN MUSK WENT FULL-ON MAGA and entered Washington D.C. with a chainsaw, this is the nucleus of the population that collectively lost it. This guy was supposed to be our salvation. Instead, he sold us down the road.
What made it all the more aggravating was that there was considerable merit in what Tesla the company was doing; thank you J.B. Straubel.
This was not ENRON. In fact, it was even worse than being swindled by some fraudulent accounting scheme. We expended our hard-earned dollars not as just a financial investment but as an emotional one, supporting Musk to lead the cause. It made him obscenely rich. Now, here he was funneling our dollars into the very antithesis of what we believed in.
And we still want that better place, damn it.
Time to do some soul searching
BUT WHAT IS EVEN MORE TROUBLING for many of us, and I include myself in this group, is that we were duped in the same fashion as the Conservative Cult Crowd.
For 40-plus years, we have watched in disbelief as Republicans slipped into their dystopian mind-numbing coma, starting with Ronald Reagan, then George Bush aka Dick Cheney, and culminating with the Charlatan Clown. We wondered how it was possible voters could not see what was happening right in front of them. And, I might add, right to them.
Yet, we Tesla owners smugly assumed we were too wise to get conned, all while we were being led by the nose by a scam artist of our own making.
To be very clear, all the ideas about climate change and what’s needed to save the planet are valid, scientifically proven. But we should have been listening to Greta Thunberg, not Elon Musk. We should have been investing in mass transit, in urban planning, in shutting down the fossil fuel industry and reining in the Military Industrial Complex. Yes, Tesla has some interesting technology. But the environmental mission statement — the manifesto — is gone from Tesla’s website, and all we got were several million more cars clogging our already overburdened streets and highways. All we ended up with was another disappointing New Shiny Thing failing to live up to the hype.
And here is the trap that we all fall into, regardless of our ideology, political affiliation, religious beliefs. Once we’ve invested, we tend to want to double down to justify our actions. Throw some good money after the bad in a vain attempt to regain our original investment. We live in denial that we made a mistake. This is the sunken cost fallacy.
We knew about Musk’s true character long before January 2025. But we had already bought in.
He spouted disinformation about COVID and violated laws to keep his Fremont factory running at the height of the pandemic. But we looked the other way. He displayed his racist-misogynist views on Twitter and then bought the platform and turned it into his own crowd-sourced Elon Musk adoration society. We again gave him the benefit of the doubt.
Unsafe at any speed
YET, IT WASN’T JUST THE dangerous political views that we conveniently dismissed. Even more egregiously, we forgave the “safety idiosyncrasies” of the Tesla car’s overall road worthiness.
We knew that Ralph Nader and many others had been warning U.S. regulators about the inherent design flaws in Tesla’s automated system for years. We not only chose to ignore the warnings, we drove the damn vehicles. Since 2014, the National Transportation Safety Board has tracked hundreds of accidents and 51 fatalities involving Tesla’s guidance system. I can personally relate one incident while driving our car that came close to adding my spouse and me to those statistics.
We were driving on I-5 north of Bakersfield, California on a clear day with perfect visibility. The road was straight. There was very light traffic. We were cruising along at 80 mph, using FSD (full self-driving). I was in the driver’s seat and I can attest that both my hands were on the wheel, when the system, without warning, slammed on the brakes.
The car skidded and swerved into the right lane before I regained control.
What caused this malfunction? This is known in the Tesla world as “phantom braking.” Whether there is a ghost in the machine or not, I don’t want it activating a “sudden unplanned deceleration” to a dead stop, especially when I’m moving almost 120 feet per second.
Here is my analysis of what happened:
There was nothing directly in front of us. But, about a quarter mile up the road, there were two white 18-wheelers side by side, as one overtook the other. My guess is the reflection of those two vehicles, which were just underneath a white concrete overpass, confused the Tesla cameras and software, which interpreted the three distinct white objects as one large obstruction. We were heading at high speed toward a giant wall, as far as the computer was concerned.
Even worse, the system misjudged the distance to this imaginary barrier as not a quarter-mile ahead, but directly in front of us. That is the only feasible explanation for why the car functioned the way it did.
This is a well-documented problem with Teslas. Musk insists the cars don’t need radar or LIDAR but obviously the cameras alone are not good enough as sensory input for full self-driving or any kind of assisted driving. Fortunately, there was no one behind us or in the right lane when this occurred, as has happened on the Bay Bridge and elsewhere.
That was the scariest incident, but not the only one for us. The car easily got confused whenever roads had been widened or repaved and residue from the old white lines remained faintly visible, or when there were traffic cones or other temporary modifications to the surface or surroundings. The car would swerve and brake without warning. We used FSD only a few times, and paid diligent attention whenever we had it activated. It never, ever felt safe.
Adding it all up
NOW IN RETROSPECT, as I think about it — the 180-degree change in politics, the disturbed behavior of the man both personally and professionally, the clearly dangerous condition of the cars — I feel like Homer Simpson, slapping my forehead. How could I have not seen it? I might as well have given $100,000 to that Nigerian prince. At least his emails were polite.
And here is the hardest realization to face: I can deride the MAGA crowd who believe in Jesus Christ and yet can justify voting for a convicted rapist and felon who doesn’t even know which end of the Bible is up (literally). Weren’t the other Tesla owners and I compartmentalizing our actions as well?
I didn’t think I could be that easily persuaded to look the other way. So I’m angry, not just at Musk, but at myself. And I bet the other FTOs (Former Tesla Owners) are feeling the same way.
How did this happen to a bunch of well-education, well-informed people?
The power of myth
THERE IS A SCHOOL OF THOUGHT, led by some serious thinkers such as Yuval Noah Harari and Karen Armstrong, that posits that there was one very key distinguishing characteristic that led to homo sapiens surviving and even thriving, while the Neanderthals, Denisovans and other species went extinct. It wasn’t our biology, superior tool making, or language. It was fiction: Telling ourselves stories that give meaning to things we don’t understand.
Where did we come from? Viracocha, or Brahma, or God. Take your pick.2Why do we die? We don’t! We just go somewhere else in another form. Why was there a flood just when we were bringing in the crops? Oh, the gods must have been angry. Maybe we need to slaughter a lamb to appease them.
Myths are the easiest path for our minds to take to explain these intractable problems.
Once humans developed this line of thinking, some interesting behaviors appeared, because believing in a common set of myths can act as an organizing principle. If one person can convince the others that he or she has been designated to act as the messenger for a god or gods, it’s pretty easy to get those people to fall in line.
The Code of Hammurabi is considered one of the most important and influential ancient legal documents in the world. But the Babylonian king for which it is named did not profess to write the 282 laws himself. He was just the messenger, delivering this fiat directly from Shamash, the Babylonian god of justice.
Moses and the Ten Commandments has a similar plot.
In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson cites that …”all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights … ” Jefferson was just acting as the scribe for a divine being when listing those rights.
Humans conjured up religion, the concept of money and monetary systems, laws and moral codes. But by convincing ourselves these abstract notions were either handed down from on above or have some higher sense of purpose, we have a convenient way to create order out of chaos.
Oh, how we love a good story.
And this is how humans were able to organize in bands of not just 50 but 500, 5,000, even 5 million. It’s how you build pyramids (and pyramid schemes), how you wage crusades, how you get millions of people to put their hands on their hearts and tearfully pledge allegiance to a fictitious entity called a country.
You can motivate a heck of a lot of people to work in concert and accomplish some pretty crazy things just by convincing them they are parter of some bigger, mysterious force.
Neanderthals never saw us coming.
The Silicon Valley myth
SOMEWHERE ALONG THE WAY in the 1990s, when our generation elected the hip, saxophone-toting Bill Clinton to be the first Baby Boomer president, we thought that maybe, just maybe we could forge a different economic model, where capitalism meets altruism, where we could throw out all the old rules for business and society, thanks to microprocessors and software.
We sincerely believed that Silicon Valley ideas, fueled by a few million in venture capital dollars, could, like alchemy changing lead into gold, make the world a better place and if some people got rich cashing in their ISOs and NSOs3 in the process, well that was pretty cool, too.
Here’s what we really did: We created our own story. It’s the Silicon Valley Myth. Its a recipe made up of all the beliefs we already know and trust: You just add a slight twist of technology, a dash of religion, a sprig or two of Adam Smith, seasoned with Utopian philosophy. Sprinkle in some goofy company names to pretend work is fun, toss in some free meals and Pilates for good measure.
Many great things have come out of Silicon Valley. Many people got rich. But, let’s admit it, the business model is no different than the Industrial Revolution: Make things and services faster, cheaper and better.
In both eras, as technology rapidly changed the status quo, humans had trouble keeping up. Some, like the Luddites revolted. Today, maybe a similar trend is the anti-vaxxers. We get overwhelmed. We look for shortcuts to the answers.
And that’s when we elevate certain people we consider successful to that myth-like status of Moses and Hammurabi.
In the Gilded Age it was the likes of Rockefeller, Edison and Carnegie. In our times it is Steve Jobs4, Bill Gates, and yes, Elon Musk. Good story tellers all who conveniently fulfill what we ask of them: to pretend they are superhuman and have all the answers.
So when a Musk comes along and says “I’ve got the solution to climate change and it’s actually cool and fun!” we fall into the same trap as all those humans before us.
We love a good story.
So, it should be no surprise that Silicon Valley employees and residents were among the earliest of early adopters of Teslas. It was the story for all Silicon Valley stories.
Rise and shine!
BUT HERE IS WHERE I GIVE MYSELF and my fellow FTOs some credit. We woke up. Yeah, think about that: We’re WOKE. And us Woke Folk woke the fuck up. We have chased that viper out of our house and it shall be banished forever.
We took to the streets and pulled the road out from under Tesla at a very critical juncture in the company’s existence.
Tesla had already been falling behind. It’s cash cow Model 3s and Model Ys were outdated at a time when EVs were fast on their way to being commoditized. BYD can deliver a better vehicle at half the price. And they aren’t just copying, they are innovating. Meanwhile, Tesla’s newest offering, the Cybertruck, is an unmitigated flop, the 21st Century Edsel.
This is all happening just when Musk needs that Tesla revenue and profit to propel the next big plays for the survival of the company: robotics. Without that financial fuel, he is going to fall further behind investing in these highly competitive and potentially very lucrative new opportunities, at the very time he is losing the lower end of the car market.
This reminds me of another story, about the famous French wit Voltaire. On his deathbed, the prolific author was being administered the Last Rites by a Catholic priest, and the conversation went something like this:
Priest: “Do you denounce Satan?” Voltaire: “No.” Priest: “Why not? Voltaire: “Now is not the time to be making enemies.”
Musk should have thought twice, even thrice, before biting the hand that carried him into a warm house, before pissing off the very customers he needed to move onto to the next big thing. It was the very wrong time to make enemies. But, of course, a viper does what is in its nature.
The only thing sustaining Tesla’s insane stock valuation now is Musk’s smoke-and-mirror show. Investors didn’t mind as long as the cash was rolling in. But the money is drying up, the smoke has dissipated and we see the man behind the curtain for who he really is. There is no path to winning back the hearts and minds of the FTOs any more than Bernie Madoff will arise from the grave and convince his old marks to invest in his latest Ponzi scheme.
I promise you this: I will never give Musk another dollar.
Musk — and Tesla — may survive, but he and the company inexorably linked with him will be forever tarnished, forever relegated to a case study in business school. It will be among the cautionary tales: Don’t do what these guys did. He will be right in there with John DeLorean of the eponymous car company, Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos, Inc., Kenneth Lay of Enron, and Adam Neumann from WeWork.
And to me, being in that company is the best place for Musk.
Unless he wants to go to Mars. I’ll break my promise and pay to send him to Mars.
FOOTNOTES
Having met both Elon Musk and Steve Jobs, I can say with certainty he will never be Steve Jobs. Jobs asked questions. He was a diligent listener. Musk is in love with his own voice and ideas. ↩︎
Virtually every organized religion in every culture has a remarkably similar story of the creation of humans. ↩︎
ISOs: Incentive Stock Options, NSOs: Non-qualified stock options. These are “options” to buy a stock at a particular price, sometimes zero and then sell them at at market rate, almost always at a very healthy profit. Stock options drive much of the employee pay packages in Silicon Valley. ↩︎
Steve Jobs died in 2011, but he is still among the top quoted and studied business gurus . ↩︎
The wind-swept sand dunes of the Colorado Desert in California.
We may think we’re Great, but, alas, we’re still Apes
ON A DRIVE FROM Yuma, Arizona to San Diego, California, I was captivated by the ever-changing, surreal topography. But two human-made structures punctuated the natural landscape in a way that got me to thinking about how much our species has in common with baboons.
Yes, baboons. But first, a bit about the scenery.
Sherry imitates a towering saguaro cactus in the Arizona desert.
On Interstate 8, it seems the moment you traverse the border at the Colorado River, the saguaro cacti disappear. It’s as though these succulents, with their iconic outstretched arms reaching for the sky, are a proprietary brand of the Copper State.
Not to be outdone, the Golden State immediately presents you with the quintessential sand dunes of the Colorado Desert, sculpted by the wind into smooth giant hills, resembling mounds of poured sugar. Except for the occasional Joshua tree, yucca plant, or creosote bush struggling to survive, the dreamy-yet-desolate terrain seems right out of Lawrence of Arabia. You might expect to see the titular character bouncing astride a loping camel, kicking sand in the air with its hooves. The distant silhouette of the Chocolate Mountains adds to the backdrop, as though painted on a movie-set canvas.
It is just past the dunes that I-8 veers directly south and then hugs the international border with Mexico. It is here that you will be introduced to The Wall.
Structure No. 1: The Wall
DEVOID OF EVEN A SEMBLANCE OF AESTHETICS, the giant black fence of solid steel thrusts discordantly out of the terrain. To put it in today’s lingo: the wall is photobombing the vast, arid landscape. The Wall serves its utilitarian purpose, but with mixed results, as has been true of such barricades for millennia. Its xenophobic ancestry can be traced to the Great Wall of China, Hadrian’s Wall, and in more modern times, the Berlin Wall.
Ineffective though it may be, The Wall’s brutalist design sends an unambiguous political message: KEEP OUT.
The Wall separates the town of Jacumba Hot Springs from its sister pueblo of Jacumé, Mexico.
Continuing west on I-8, the next section of The Wall you will spot is in the diminutive town of Jacumba Hot Springs. This hamlet of 800 or so souls has the privilege of sporting one of the first incarnations of this ugly fortification, erected during the Clinton administration.
I’m not sure who had the bright idea to construct this monstrosity with steel plates left over from the Vietnam War. Maybe some political consultant thought this could be spun as a “swords to plowshares” narrative.
But the irony is just too delectable to ignore. After using this material to violently (and unsuccessfully) invade a far-off land, all in the name of democracy, the U.S. then recycles this war-machine detritus to “protect” itself from huddled masses yearning to be free… Give me your tired, your poor,1 but not if they are your next-door neighbors, I guess.
All of this is worthy of a treatise on its own, but I’ll have to save that for a later day.
Although the wall in Jacumba is technically on the edge of town, it’s perceived by the villagers as having cleaved their lives in two, since many residents had or still have relatives in the sister pueblo of Ejido Jacumé on the Mexican side. What was once a casual 10- or 15-minute walk can now take a half day of driving — via the nearest “official” border crossing.
There’s plenty more diverse scenery to savor on this leg of the journey, including the Anza Borrego Desert and the Jacumba Wilderness itself. Also worthy of note is Smuggler’s Gulch, named in the 1880s for the cattle rustling that occurred between the U.S. and Mexico — in which direction I’m not sure. Here, in a very narrow canyon, giant sandstone boulders, many the size of a McMansion, teeter on cliffs. These car-crushing rocks appear ready to roll any minute.
Structure No. 2: The Bridge
The Nello Irwin Greer Memorial Bridge, more commonly known as the Pine Valley Creek Bridge, rises some 440 feet, or 134 meters, from the ground. Photo by George J. Janczyn. Used with permission2.
AS YOU CONTINUE YOUR JOURNEY to San Diego, you’ll ascend once again and eventually enter the Cleveland National Forest. You will then be confronted with a deep canyon that would be impossible to traverse in any vehicular manner were it not for a unique marvel of engineering.
This is the second of the two aforementioned structures that brought baboons to mind (yes, I’m getting to that). And it is officially known as the Nello Irwin Greer Memorial Bridge, named in honor of the engineer who managed the project. But it is more commonly referred to as the Pine Valley Creek Bridge.
Now — full disclosure — I’m a bit biased when it comes to comparing walls to bridges3. The former is there to exclude one group of humans from another. The latter, on the other hand, intends to unite us.
At the time of its completion in 1974, the Stone Valley Creek Bridge was the highest concrete girder viaduct in the world. That is impressive. But for me, what is even more inspiring is how Greer and his team accomplished this feat utilizing such an elegant design.
The segmented cantilevered method used to hold the road bed aloft is a clever Y-shaped row of pillars. Moreover, the entire ensemble seems to at once blend in with its environs and enhance the scenery at the same time.
I can’t think of many “man-made” structures that can do that.
The backstory on this span across Stony Creek is a fitting juxtaposition to The Wall in Jacumba. Greer rerouted I-8 to save the town of Pine Valley, for which I’m sure its citizens are forever grateful.
The Wall cuts a town in two; The Bridge saves a town. You can see where this is all heading and that is why it is now time to cue the baboons.
EQ vs. IQ
I CAN’T SAY I HAD EVER HAD even a modicum of interest in learning about these distant primate cousins of ours until 2019. At the time, Sherry and I were hiking in the Table Mountain National Park at the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa.
Although the Cape feels like the edge of the world, this walk did not seem particularly remote. There’s plenty of fellow tourists and the trail is clearly marked. There is even a restaurant at the summit.
A baboon mother and child, resting in the shade in Table Mountain National Park, on the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa
But to our surprise that day, a mother baboon with a child in tow casually crossed our path and then nonchalantly sat on a wall, seemingly oblivious to our existence. We stopped for a while to grab a video but kept our distance, out of respect.
I was inspired by that incident to read up on baboons and came across A Primate’s Memoir, by renowned primatologist Robert Sapolsky, who had spent decades living among and studying these animals in eastern Africa.
To look at them, you’d notice very few physical characteristic similar to homo sapiens. Baboons walk on all fours, have a snout that seems to be a cross between a dog and a bear, and possess enormous, menacing canines just for good measure. They have tails and sleep in trees.
And to be sure, baboons do not make things, like walls and bridges. So what do we have in common?
Baboons are very social creatures, notes Sapulsky. They live in groups ranging from a few to fifty. They “work” a four-hour day, which is all the time they need to forage for food. They sleep another 10 hours. And that provides them with a full 10 hours to interact with one another.
And interact they do. They make friends; they make enemies. They establish hierarchy that can be inherited. If you are the offspring of the alpha male, you have it made. There are prom kings and queens, and wallflowers. They woo, they mate, they raise their offspring.
They can be snobby. They might bully. They can be empathetic. They can plot and form alliances to outmaneuver rivals. They seek revenge, often very viciously. They are not above kidnapping.4
Sounds a lot like a Netflix eight-episode dramatic series. It should not be surprising, then, that baboons seem to reflect so much of human behavior, since we still share 94% of the same DNA.5
We have certainly progressed intellectually far beyond the capacity of any of our ancient ancestors. We have self-awareness, sophisticated language, arts and sciences. We build not only walls and bridges but amazing technology. But let’s face it: our emotional intelligence, or EQ in modern parlance, hasn’t evolved at the same pace. That stuff has gotta be buried very deep in that 94% DNA we have in common.
As the old saying goes, we’re just apes with nukes. And that’s never been truer — or a scarier thought — than it is today.
Curiosity, the cat, and the Doomsday Clock
FROM THE MOMENT OUR ANCESTORS descended from the trees, we have been testing the law of unintended consequences. We discovered fire, brought it into our caves, where, along with warming our hands, we inhaled smoke and developed lung cancer. We hunted megafauna to extinction. We created factories and vehicles that burn fossil fuels that are cooking our planet, which, by the way, is our one and only ride through space.6
The list of things we have tried that have backfired is seemingly endless.
The Wall hasn’t stopped people from attempting to cross the border. It has, however, created a thriving underground economy — literally. Tunneling under the wall is a big business. And coyotes — guides who charge a fee to smuggle people across the border — are making money, sometimes simply scamming destitute El Norte-bound travelers out of their last pesos.
For the most part, we’ve tested this law of unintended consequences in the physical world. We more or less understand this tangible realm. We can sense it. We can feel it. We can grasp it not only intellectually but emotionally.
But the virtual world is different. Whereas in the physical world, the intended purpose of a bridge is obviously distinct from a wall, in the virtual world, things get blurry in a hurry.
Our past meets our future: A prehistoric human hand connecting with a robot hand. Image, appropriately enough, is AI-generated.
In the 1990s I was working in Silicon Valley at the very infancy of the Internet. In those days, the buzz phrase du jour was “democratization of information.” Everyone would have an equal voice and be able to project that voice to the world. That bridge quickly became a wall when corporate interests privatized the internet, rewarding our worst instincts to drive their ad-based revenue models. And that’s where our baboon behavior just became amplified. Bullying, hate crimes, tribalism.
Emotionally, we just can’t keep up. Technology is advancing at a logarithmic pace, but the areas of the human brain that deal with emotion — the prefrontal cortex, amygdala, limbic system, hippocampus — continue to evolve linearly at, well, a snail’s pace.
In the brave new world, the scale at which our endeavors are likely to backfire is exponential.
With Artificial Intelligence (AI), we are being promised new and greater opportunities without any idea of what the scope of the consequences will be. It reminds me of the story about the moment just before the first test of an atomic weapon, when Enrico Fermi mused that there was a greater-than-zero chance the explosion would ignite the entire world’s atmosphere. 7
And yet, we did it anyway.
Curiosity may have killed the cat, but humans somehow keep on ticking.
Yes, we have somehow survived — so far. But there’s something else ticking, coming from the Doomsday Clock, which is now at a mere 89 seconds before midnight, its most dire setting since the metaphorical instrument was created in 1947. To put this into perspective, the clock stood at 7 minutes during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Eighty-nine seconds before midnight. Will you look at the time? It’s getting late. And on that note, sleep tight.
.
FOOTNOTES
Paraphrased from the poem, The Collosus, by Emma Lazarus. The poem is inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty. ↩︎
My reverence for bridges was further instilled by my father, a civil engineer who designed and oversaw construction of numerous spans in his career. I remember as a child driving to Long Island and crossing the newly opened Verazzanno-Narrows in 1965, then the longest suspension bridge in the world,3 as dear old Dad regaled his offspring with myriad facts about the engineering marvel holding our rattling little Rambler station wagon some 228 feet (70 meters) above the water. ↩︎
Sapulsky cautions against anthropomorphism, using terms such as kidnapping to describe baboon behavior. ↩︎
Humans would not survive the massive doses of radiation they would sustain in a journey to Mars. The proposals by megabillionaire oligarchs to inhabit other planets is pure folly with today’s technology. ↩︎
Fermi jokingly offered to take bets, but it’s hard to imagine anyone wagering that such a catastrophe would occur, because if it did, collecting one’s payout in a planet engulfed in flames might be a tad difficult. ↩︎
DOROTHY GALE, she of Oz fame, was fond of pronouncing: “There’s no place like home.” But, did she really mean it?
Was life on that monochromatic farm out in the middle of nowhere, Kansas, really better than the glorious Technicolor™ world of Oz, where she had met all kinds of characters and had experienced the time of her life?
I’m pretty sure she felt at least a tinge of ambivalence about the whole affair. She was reticent to leave Oz, but happy to be returning to her family.
Sherry and I can relate to Dorothy’s conundrum, if somewhat in reverse. We are sad in leaving home sweet home, yet exhilarated to be exploring a new chapter in our time together.
Top right: Our patio and much-used pool. Bottom left: Our music studio. Right: Our family room, including one-of-a-kind items we would not sell: The Japanese-style table Sherry and I made, a wood sculpture made by Francine Berg, a painting by Andy Newman, and underneath it a little school-house style bench I made. Plants are all Sherry’s handiwork.
WE LOVED OUR HUMBLE ABODE, nestled in the meandering hills of the Conejo Valley, California, just an hour north of L.A. and 20 minutes from the Pacific Ocean. We had wildlife visiting diurnally and nocturnally, often very vocally (owls hooting at 3 a.m. comes to mind).
It was a bucolic lifestyle. At dawn, we would sip our coffee to the pace of drifting fog, which by late morning would burn off to reveal yet another glorious day in the Golden State. At dusk, we could sip our wine, reveling in our panorama of the fuchsia-hued Santa Monica Mountains, as the sandstone peaks caught vestiges of light from the setting sun.
A view from our (former) backyard of the sun setting on the Santa Monica Mountains.
But we knew, unequivocally, it was time to leave it all behind on the morning of Nov. 6, 2025, as I described in this previous post. And so here we are, on the road, with no place to officially designate as “home” and no particular place to go. At the moment we are in an apartment in the U.K. Next week we’ll be in France. We have a vague plan that eventually takes us to South Africa, but that plan is certainly subject to change.
In February, when we put our home on the market and began packing up our things, we found ourselves wishing aloud that there were someway to magically transport our house to another land, preferably in some manner less turbulent than a tornado.
There is some place like home
THE DWELLING AND LAND that we occupied for nearly five years is a beautiful place.
We moved there at the height of the pandemic. During that stressful time, our new habitat felt like an oasis in the middle of a blinding sand storm.
Although it was a track home in a suburb, it was surrounded by open space. It had a very aesthetically pleasing yet practical design, and with lots of character, thanks to artistic flourishes commissioned by the previous owners.
Sherry harvesting fruit from our strawberry tree.
It was our first real estate purchase together and we spent a copious amount of time adorning it with our own personal touches. We converted one room into a professional music studio (aka Sherry’s Batgirl Cave,1 since she spent an inordinate amount of time in there, often into the wee hours, mixing and producing).
We had a bright, spacious kitchen designed for cooking, where we doubled down on our culinary efforts and whipped up some savory repasts. As I write this, I can sense the scintillating aromas wafting about: sourdough bread fresh from the oven, or maybe briani (a Mauritian version of Indian biriani) simmering in a cast iron pot on the cooktop.2
Our backyard led to a protected, natural landscape (hence, the abundant wildlife). We had a lap pool and fruit trees. And when Sherry wasn’t in her Batgirl Cave, she was out tending to or harvesting her beds of herbs. She also became a proficient indoor gardener. Greenery of every variety adorned our walls, tables, shelves, and nooks and crannies.
Many days we found ourselves reciting this sentence: “Let’s never move again.” We were staying put. Done. Finished. Or so we thought. In the words of Yogi Berra: “It ain’t over until it’s over.”3
A trial run: Silicon Valley to Conejo Valley
THIS WAS NOT OUR FIRST GO on this merry-go-round. After Sherry moved in with me in my little rancher in the San Francisco Bay Area, we decided to do a complete remodel, transforming the ramshackle structure into a sleek, open, modern domicile. And then in 2018, we set about selling that home and most of our belongings to try the vagabond lifestyle before settling down again 24 months later. So, in some ways, that entire episode was a trial run; we just didn’t know it at the time.
Our previous home in Los Altos, CA. We converted a sleepy little rancher into an open, naturally lighted abode. We adorned our backyard with lots of homemade garden art. A mere two years later, we sold the house and most of our contents to hit the road.
Home is a state of mind
TO KEEP THINGS IN PERSPECTIVE, we think about the generations before us. My father’s parents were born and raised in a tiny village in Italy. They joined millions of their fellow citizens, emigrating in the 1890s to what they hoped would be a new and better life in the United States. I have documented that odyssey here. (My mother’s parents did the same in the early part of the 20th Century. I am researching that story now.)
Sherry’s family escaped war in China in the 1930s, in some cases by disguising themselves to stow aboard boats of questionable sea worthiness. After enduring a grueling maritime trip, they set foot on the tiny island of Mauritius in the middle of the Indian Ocean. They, too, could only hope that this new, tiny speck of terra firma would be the scene for a better life, clear of the violence and famine they had endured in their homeland.
Born to run, or at least to move
EACH GENERATION OF OUR species tends to view whatever events shaped their era as unique. But let’s face it, what we are going through is nothing compared to the first of our ancestors, who decided to leap down from a tree at the risk of being eaten by saber-tooth tigers.
Even our grandparents had it pretty easy in comparison to what those guys went through.
Once these ancient relatives descended from their arboreal perches, they began to look around and see what they could find. They were on the move. Then, some 400,000 years ago, as they continued to migrate, they began erecting shelters,4 thereby establishing a sense of permanency. And yet, they kept moving.
The cycle today might be that we establish “roots” somewhere, but then move — because of an employment opportunity, to help a family member, or just to seek out new horizons. Yet, the tendency to explore beyond our immediate environs seems permanently ingrained within some neurons deep inside our cerebral cortex that we inherited from long ago.
THE WESTERN CONCEPT of home is quite limited, when compared to other cultures. For the Bedouin people, it is not a place so much as a family. The denizens of Nuakata Island, Papua New Guinea refer to home as the village of their matrilineal ancestors. It has nothing to do with what dwelling they are currently inhabiting. The Warlpiri in Australia consider home a combination of where they came from and where they have camped in their lifetime.
The indigenous people of what is now the United States had many different approaches. The stereotype is usually nomadic tribes erecting tepees as they followed roaming bison herds. But tribes in the Northeast, such as the Mohegan, engineered and constructed wigwams, domestic structures so well insulated and waterproof that the European colonizers considered them far superior to the mud-and-straw huts they had left in their villages on the other side of the Atlantic.
Yet, these tribes didn’t necessarily consider those wigwams “home.” The lands in which they hunted and farmed were home. In his book “1491,” Charles Mann explains that these people didn’t sit still in one place and they didn’t exactly wander. They actually tended huge swaths of terrain, creating an entire ecosystem, in which controlled burning was used to fashion a sort of giant natural park. In that park they could readily harvest all the flora and fauna they needed for sustenance and for shelter. That was home to them.
Two of a kind, of one mind
WHEN SHERRY AND I FIRST MET, we both had already done a considerable amount of traveling. She out of necessity, having grown up in such a remote location. (Fun fact: Mauritius is just about half way around the world from California).
It’s a long way from California to Mauritius: 18,400 kilometers, or 11,500 miles.
For me, well, I guess I have the wandering gene in my DNA. At 18 months old, I embarked on my first solo bipedal journey. Apparently, I made it three blocks or so down a very busy West Street in Bristol, CT, before my mother caught up to me and summarily ended my odyssey. Of course, I was too young to remember that story, but it became family lore.
I inherited this wanderlust from my mother, undoubtedly. She had an indefatigable zest to search. There’s always a chance that something interesting just might be around the corner, so why not find out? 5
Then, in high school, my parents did just that, uprooting their entire clan of nine kids from the tiny hamlet of Whigville, CT., to pursue a new life. In the Nutmeg State, we were living in a century-old farmhouse, with the Nassahegan State Forest abutting our property and a dairy farm across the street. But somehow that wasn’t pastoral enough. So we ended up in the Pine Tree State — Maine — on our very own farm overlooking the Kennebec River, 90 miles south of the Quebec Province border. Now that was rural. We were out there.
The 100-acre farm my parents purchased, overlooking the Kennebec River in Solon, Maine, 90 miles south of the Canadian border. I spent my teen years learning to operate a tractor, a chainsaw and an axe, among other tools of the trade.
When I came of age, I set out to slake my thirst for the unknown, this time via automobile. A buddy and I took a cross-country road trip, which ended in California, where I immediately declared that this was where I wanted to live. Although most of my adult life has been in that state, I did take a break by living in Germany for a spell. And I have traveled to six continents and too many countries to count, whether on vacation or for work.
So, perhaps, it was meant to be, for two likeminded globetrotters to meet and share this passion for exploring the planet.
In the end, I guess, we can agree with Dorothy’s declaration: There is no place like home. Sure enough. But we’d hasten to qualify that proclamation with another well-worn, albeit corny but appropriate aphorism: Home is where the heart is.
FOOTNOTES:
A sort of portmanteau. Sherry’s love for fruit, especially mangos, has led me to surmise she was a fruit bat in a previous life. You can read more about her studio here. ↩︎
Yogi Berra also claimed: “I’ve never said most of the things I’ve said.” So we’ll have to take his definition of finality with a proverbial grain of salt. ↩︎
It could be as long as 1.8 millions year ago, depending on how you qualify what a structure is. ↩︎
Mom was always in search of a bargain. Second-hand stores, thrift stores, discount stores that sold dented cans, rejects, or day-old bread were always on her radar. But she was also an avid collector. If you hopped in the car with her to run an errand, you might end up 40 miles away at an antique store. ↩︎
AS I WRITE THIS, I am sitting at a tiny kitchen table in a flat on the 20th floor of some nondescript apartment building in Canary Wharf, London.
Our cantilevered balcony, with its tempered glass wall, provides a bird’s-eye view of the Isle of Dogs Canal some 200 feet (or 60 meters) below, but obtaining that perspective means standing on said balcony, which provokes a serious case of vertigo. And so we content ourselves with a more limited but secure view from indoors.
Our panoramic view of the Isle of Dogs.
We arrived late last night, after a long day’s journey by train from Frankfurt, Germany that carried us past rolling hills, mustard fields and verdant forests and then, with the screech of the brakes, plunged us into the mayhem, chaos and attitude that is so très Paris.
There we switched from the TGV (Train à Grande Vitesse, or high speed train) to the Eurostar, to be whisked through the Chunnel to Merry Ol’ England.
One of the minor details I missed when booking the tickets was that we would be switching not only trains, but train stations. Traveling from Gare de l’Est to Gare du Nord requires a mere 5-minute cab ride. But convincing a taxi driver in France (where arrogance is apparently written into the job description) to help load a pallet-load of luggage (we are not traveling lightly) for such a short distance, then ferry us through lunch-time traffic but a mere number of blocks, and then help unload the bags was no easy task. Sherry’s fluency in French (and fluency in assertiveness, I might add) came in handy. So did the €20 I handed the cabbie.
Our motivation for this sojourn was not so much to comehere as it was to get outof the United States.
The romance of traveling by train is gone
ONCE INSIDE THE STATION, we were met with a cacophony of fellow travelers, all of them in a hurry and more than a few of them rude, a labyrinth of checkpoints with impatient attendants shouting orders and cursing the ignorance of the passengers. Thanks to Brexit, we had to elbow our way through multiple security screenings and baggage X-ray machines that made the TSA seem positively tame.
The Eurostar train was comfortable and relatively quiet. The staff were polite and the meal was fair (certainly improved with a glass of white wine). This all provided a bit of respite for what was to follow.
We arrived at St. Pancras Station and took the quintessential Black Cab (or hackney carriage, if you prefer) during the height of commute hour to our apartment. If you don’t know the set-up of these rigs, your luggage is placed in front of you in the passenger area, not in some trunk. Each swerve of the cab illustrates in real time Newtonian physics, with an equal and opposite reaction. A body in motion — or luggage in this case — stays in motion, until met by a human body that bears the brunt of all the jostling.
That was the easy part. Getting the key to the rental unit was an ordeal unlike any we have encountered, and we are very seasoned travelers. This all added at least an hour (and an additional £25) to our already taxing journey, but we finally found entry to the building, ascended the “lift” to the aforementioned flat and collapsed.
On a stroll across a pedestrian bridge spanning the Isle of Dogs Canal on an unseasonably warm and sunny day for April in London.
We have a bit of business in London to attend to, and friends and family to visit. Beyond that, our plans are vague, undefined. That is because our motivation for this sojourn was not so much to come here as it was to get out of the United States.
In with the Ex-pats
MOST LIKELY YOU’VE read stories about citizens of the U.S. contemplating a permanent change of address, leaving the country because of the political calamity now engulfing the world’s largest economy (a position that might not hold for long, based on the current downward trajectory). Some estimates claim 20 percent of U.S. citizens are investigating emigration. But do you know anyone who has actually followed through with that intent? Well, you do now.
Here is how it unfolded:
On Nov. 6, 2024, I awoke to the news that still to this day seems incredulous. I found myself that morning pacing the kitchen floor and actually heard myself uttering this phrase aloud: “We have to get out of here.”
I’m an early riser, while my better half is a night owl. But within minutes of arising and hearing the news herself, she was in agreement with me and we began to discuss our options.
We are decisive. We are also organized. And so a strategy with spreadsheets and punch lists was created, and we went to work executing our grand plan.
Within a month of that fateful November day, we had interviewed several realtors and chosen one to represent us in putting our humble abode on the market.
In the meantime, we arranged for the sale of almost all our personal belongings, and the very tiny portion of goods that we kept were either sent to storage or put aside to be stuffed into our travel luggage.
In between all that frenetic activity, we actually spent a few weeks in Malaysia and Taiwan for a milestone-birthday family celebration on Sherry’s side of the family. This excursion was more like a business trip, since an inordinate amount of time was consumed working on our exit plan remotely, with voluminous conference calls, emails and texts.
We returned to the U.S., and by mid-April, we were done with all of it. The title to the house was in the buyers’ hands, their money was in our bank. And so we hopped in a rental car (we had already sold our vehicle) for one final road trip to visit family and then to tick off a few bucket-list tourist spots (namely, the Hoover Dam and Death Valley, both of which I highly recommend visiting).
We returned the rental in L.A., where we spent a few days downtown (our old haunt). Then, on Monday morning, 21 April, we boarded a very creaky Lufthansa 747 at LAX and landed some 12 hours later in Frankfurt. We chose Germany as a starting point to our new adventure because Sherry hadn’t been there before and I thought I could show her around the place, since I lived there for a spell.
We didn’t get to much of the tourism portion of the plan. That’s because we hadn’t planned on the Big Crash. To be clear, I don’t mean the stock market. We actually anticipated that one (as did most of the thinking world). This one was physical, emotional, and compounded by jet lag. We had been running on adrenaline for six months, a frenetic pace that included copious amounts of stress and more than one or two raised voices with our real estate agent, our estate sales manager and one or two other contractors handling things.
And when it was all done, we were exhausted. We also still had quite a bit of “paperwork” to finish, bank accounts, changes of address, and travel arrangements to make. So we wound up mostly holed up in a typically utilitarian German apartment for the better part of a week. We did visit our local neighborhood, which was a pleasant blend of shops and cuisine from around the world. And we did hop on a train for a day trip to Heidelberg, which I’ll post about later.
What comes next is anybody’s guess
NEITHER OF US WANTED to leave. We had a beautiful home nestled in a pleasant little burb with plenty of open space in Southern California. We had coyotes, bobcats, rattlesnakes, hawks, owls, rabbits, even roadrunners in our midst. We were 20 minutes by car from the azure waters of the Pacific Ocean. We’d take a weekend every so often to L.A., which usually included a night at the Philharmonic and a dinner at our favorite little Italian restaurant. We had a very comfortable life. But it was clear to us on that day in November that the U.S. had reached a point of no return to any sense of normalcy.1
For those of you who plan to stay and fight, we applaud you. But for us, we are taking our cue from that great poet-philosopher-songwriter and TV personality Kenny Rogers: “You’ve got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, know when to walk away, know when to run.” 2
We don’t know exactly know where we will go or what will follow, we only know it was time to run.
Stay tuned.
——————————————————————-
1A term unwittingly coined by Herbert Hoover.
2For those readers old enough to remember that classic hit, “The Gambler,” I apologize for having condemned your brain to running that melody on infinite loop. It should subside in about 24 hours, if my experience is any indicator.
SOME YEARS AGO, I was on a business trip to Buenos Aires, Argentina. On the way from the airport to my hotel, I asked the driver to show me around a bit, which he readily obliged. It was early January, which is the start of summer down under. The narrow streets were shaded by poplars and flowering jacarandas. The European architecture could easily have been mistaken for a city on the other side of the pond.
At one point, we stopped at a memorial.
“Para la guerra,” he said. My Spanish was limited, but I figured it out.
“Falklands War?” I inquired.
Monument honoring the Argentinian soldiers who fought and died in “La Guerra de Las Malvinas,” otherwise known as the Falklands War in 1982.
“Aquí decimos Malvinas,” he said, with perhaps a slight tinge of reprobation. And to ensure I got the message, he repeated in halting English: “Here, we say, ‘Malvinas War.” I guessed he had made this correction to other English-speaking visitors in the past. Whatever title is used, the fact remains that the military conflict between the United Kingdom and Argentina lasted 74 days and cost 649 lives and wounded another 1,657, all in a contest over the very remote, sparsely populated, wind-swept chunks of land known as South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands, located a mere752 mi (1,210 km) from the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula.
Newspaper clipping from a full page of coverage in The Gazette, Montreal, Canada, 29 May 1982.
“Of course,” I said, shaking my head in the affirmative to underscore that I got the point.
As I stood looking at the monument that day, it brought back memories of my career in journalism. At the time of the war in 1982, I held a position known as a “wire editor” at a tiny daily newspaper in Alameda, CA, just across the bay from San Francisco. A wire editor’s job is to monitor incoming posts from syndicated news agencies such as Reuters, Associated Press, and others and then edit those stories to fit the news space allocated by the newspaper.
What I recall clearly during that conflict was that those news agencies, which were all English-speaking, held a very pro-British narrative.
But one life to live
A statue of Nathan Hale.
AND THEN, JUST a few weeks ago, I was browsing through old newspaper articles. I mean very old, from 1776, a pivotal year in the history of the United States. My eye caught a one-paragraph missive that referred to Nathan Hale, who every American child learns to idolize as a patriot of the Revolutionary War.
Nathan is right up there as an icon alongside Paul Revere and George Washington.
As the story goes, young Nathan, all of 21 years old, volunteered to spy on the British in their camp in New York during the conflict. On Sept. 22, 1776, he was caught, tried, and sentenced to be hanged.
His final words, so often repeated, were: “I regret that I have but one life to live for my country.”
(Many historians have doubted the veracity of this quote, but to this day the sentence persists.)
The British had a different opinion of the hanging and made that quite clear in a letter datelined the day after Hale’s hanging and published two months to the day after the execution. (Mail was a little slow in those days.) In the Derby Mercury, from Derbyshire, England, the writer pronounced that: “Yesterday, we hanged a Colonel of the Provincials, who came as a Spy. Our Army is in good spirits, very healthful, and long to attack the Rebels …”
The letter goes on to optimistically predict the defeat of the “Rebels” within the year. And we know, of course, how that turned out.
TODAY MARKS the one-year anniversary of Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. The Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, who as a KGB foot soldier had a front-row seat to the collapse of the Soviet Union, has offered a considerable amount of rhetoric to justify his actions, which, is obviously to put the USSR back together again.
University of Rochester illustration / Michael Osadciw
But I think the words of war correspondent and political analyst tells it best. In his prescient 2015 book, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World, Tim Marshall postulates that Russia, the largest country in the world, spanning 11 times zones and covering six million square miles, is, ironically, at a disadvantage because of its terrain.
From the north, facing the wide expanses of frozen tundra that give way to the Arctic Ocean, it has little to worry about. The Ural Mountains protect the European portion of Russia, especially Moscow, from any incursion from the east.
But Russia has been invaded many times in the past five hundred years. And nowhere is it more vulnerable, according to Marshall, than in the flat grassy plains that give way to the Ukraine, which, in Putin’s mind, is the gateway to the decadent West.
“Vladimir Putin says he is a religious man, a great supporter of the Russian Orthodox Church. If so, he may well go to bed each night, say his prayers, and ask God: “Why didn’t you put some mountains in the Ukraine.”
Author Tim Marshall
After one year, it’s clear the war is not going as planned for Putin. He did not anticipate such a fierce, consolidated, purposeful resistance from the Ukrainian people. And he was counting on NATO and especially the United States, providing little assistance.
How it all ends up, I do not know. But his dream of putting the USSR back together seems to be fading day by day.
John Wilkes Booth, the most infamous of thespians and perhaps the only one of his profession to actually change the course of history in the United States, was unabashedly in favor of The Confederacy. He made no secret of his dislike for Abraham Lincoln, and Booth was even jailed and fined a hefty some for his treasonous comments toward the 16th president.
So, it’s fair to say, the two men were never on the same page, at least figuratively speaking. They were, however, on the same page literally on at least one occasion.
It was by chance that I caught this on page 3 of The National Republican’s edition of Nov. 12, 1863.
Here, you can see a legal announcements for Lincoln, who is endorsing several candidates for various government positions. Across the page, we have an advertisement for Booth, who is performing at the Ford Theater, the very establishment in which he effected the dastardly deed in 1865.
Actor John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln and then leaped to the stage of the Ford Theater pronouncing to the audience: “Sic semper tyrannis,” Latin for “Thus, always to tyrants.”
ON AN UNSEASONABLY chilly spring day, the passengers of the S/S California1 stood on the deck while the captain and crew navigated the busy waters of New York Harbor. The misty salt air must have been a welcome reprieve for the majority of the souls on board. Most of the 773 travelers had been traveling in “steerage,” 2 where they had endured at least two and possibly three weeks of existence in the crowded, stuffy, odoriferous, infested bowels of the ship.
The day was Thursday, May 20, 1897. The passengers possessed surnames such as Guiseppe, Pasquale, Luigi, Monaco, Durante, Gallo, Amelio, de Mitro. They had boarded the craft in Napoli (Naples) sometime earlier in the month. They had listed their occupations as shoemakers, carpenters, barbers, spinners, musicians, stone cutters, bootmakers, photographers, housewives, and laborers.
Among those laborers was one with a surname that stands out for me. It was 28-year-old Fazio Paolini.
The S/S California was built in 1872 in Glasgow, Scotland. She weighed 3,410 tons and measured 361 feet in length. The hybrid ship had three sailing masts and one smokestack for the steam engine. She could reach 13 knots (15 mph), which would have been capable of traveling from Naples to New York in 15 days at best. More than likely, the trip took closer to 3 weeks.
As the ship’s horn announced its imminent arrival at Ellis Island, Fazio, sporting a neatly trimmed handlebar mustache and sharply dressed in his best Victorian-era style suit, no doubt joined his fratelli in a bit of anxious sight-seeing, as they peered over the railing to catch a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty, now coming into full view on nearby Liberty Island.
The iconic colossus was not even a teenager, erected just 11 years before. And she had yet to earn the nickname as the Green Lady. Her flowing tunic — made of copper — would have still reflected its amber hues. It would be many more years before the moist salt air would oxidize the sheathing into its now-familiar patina.
FAZIO PAOLINI
Fazio was just six days shy of his 29th birthday, but at that moment, it is unlikely he had any sort of celebration of this anniversary on his mind. Everything he knew and everyone he loved had been left behind in Italy: his young wife, Francesca Giansanti Paolini, an infant daughter, Consetta, his mother, Vittoria, and brother, Sabatino.
And now, thousands of miles from home in a strange land, unable to speak the language, with little money, no job, no place to live, he would have to quickly find his way and get established. Then, if all went well, he could earn and save enough to finance passage for his wife, his daughter, and his brother.
Family folklore
As with all families, there are stories about ancestry, and one I recall my father relaying about his father — Fazio Paolini — was the arduous passage to the New World. It went something like this:
Fazio and his father traveled for 30 days on a creaky sailing ship. Upon arrival, Fazio’s father was turned away because he did not have the proper paperwork. So he had to return on that ancient vessel to his homeland.
Claude Albert Paolini
As to the description of the ship’s antiquated condition, that is accurate. The S/S Californiawas built in 1872 in Glasgow, Scotland. As the fuzzy image demonstrates, it did have sailing masts, three by all available data that I could find. It also housed a steam engine. By 1897, this vessel, operated by the Anchor Line, also of Scotland, would have been far beyond its prime. The ship was tiny, and the engine was puny by standards of the turn of the century. (The S/S in the name actually stood for “single screw,” meaning the ship had only one propeller.)
It was a slow, outdated steamer at the very end of its lifespan. In fact, Fazio and his fellow passengers that day would have been on one of the boat’s last excursions. It would be decommissioned and then scrapped for its metal and other materials just a few years later.
But other information in my father’s story about Fazio’s sojourn doesn’t add up. For instance, Carmine Paolini, Fazio’s father, could not have been on that journey with his son since Carmine died in 1890, seven years before this event. Now, the S/S California ship manifest does list another Paolini, one Domenico Paolini, age 28. There are several Domenico Paolinis in the family tree, and they can be traced back as far as the early 1700s. None of them were alive at this time, however.
So who was Domenico? And, did he have to return to Italy for lack of paperwork?3 This remains a mystery that warrants further investigation.4
Leaving home
Imagine a bucolic village nestled in rolling, verdant hills, sculpted by thousands of years of farming. Orchards and vineyards, stone walls, copses of deciduous trees frame the landscape. This pastoral setting is nestled between the majestic, glaciated Apennine Mountains and the balmy, turquoise waters of the Adriatic Sea. That fits the description of Cepagatti, located in the province of Pescara, Italy. And by all appearances, it is an idyllic place.
Farmland in the hills of Cepagatti, Italy, with the Apennine Mountain range in the background. Cepagatti is located in the province of Pescara, in the Abruzzo region on the Adriatic Sea.
It was there that Fazio Paolini was born on May 26, 1868. Both his parents, Carmine Paolini and Vittoria Mirabilio, were Cepagatti natives as well. And Carmine’s family goes back yet another generation, all the way to 1757. So this was indeed the homeland for my ancestors on the Paolini side.
Fazio’s name is recorded in the birth registry in Cepagatti. The date is May 26, 1868.
Why leave?
The home in which Fazio was born. (Photo by Carl Aiello)
The pristine beauty of the place belies the turmoil — both natural and political — that enveloped not only Italy but most of Europe in the period of 1870-1920 when 11 million citizens — 4 million from Italy alone — emigrated to America.5
The ship’s manifest listing Fazio Paolini. Although it might look like the surname is “Pastine,” all available evidence and process of elimination lead me to a near certainty that this is our guy. The age is right, the date is right. The surname “Pastine” does not exist in Italy. Note that the mysterious Domenico Paolini is listed as well.
Fazio and his fellow passengers on the S/S California were undoubtedly motivated to find a new life, away from disease, poverty, political upheaval, and uncertainty. But making that decision could not have been trivial. Imagine what it must have been like for Fazio’s mother, Vittoria Mirabilio Paolini, when she heard the news. She had already lost her husband and a daughter.6 And now her son was leaving her, with the prospect that in a year, he would take Vittoria’s only other son and her only grandchild.
In the coming chapter of this saga, I’ll provide a glimpse of what life must have been like as a passenger in “steerage.”
1 Based on all available data that I could find, the S/S California operated by the Anchor Line is the right vessel. Between 1870 and 1930, numerous ships were christened with some variation of “California.” Perhaps the most famous — or infamous — ship to carry the California name was built in 1903 and was operating in the waters near the Titanic on its fateful day. By all accounts, the captain of that California had the ability to rescue most, if not all, of the passengers but declined to help.
2 Contrary to popular belief, the term “steerage” was not initially a reference to packing people in like cattle. Steerage is the section of the vessel containing the pulleys, ropes, and levers that comprise the mechanics necessary to navigate or “steer” the ship. It was the cheapest place to house those passengers who could not afford first class (sometimes referred to as “saloon”) or second class. Either way, of course, the term is appropriate.
3 Contrary to popular belief, the derisive term “WOP” was not an acronym for “without papers” or “without a passport.” It was actually derived from the term “guappo,” which sounds to the English-speaking ear as “WHOPPO” and roughly translates into “a guy who swaggers.” Italian laborers referred to each other with this term, perhaps much like the term “dude” is used today. English speakers heard the word as “WOP.”)
4 I did find two other Domenico Paolini individuals who roughly fit the time frame, one who lived in Illinois and the other in Massachusetts. Neither, however, seems to fit within the family tree. And so, the Domenico onboard the S/S California in 1897 remains a mystery. There are no other individuals with the Paolini surname in the registry. And, unfortunately, the registration record of Domenico and Fazio at Ellis Island went up in flames only a month after their arrival. So all we have to go on is that document from the S/S California.
6 As noted previously, Vittoria’s husband and Fazio’s father, Carmine Paolini, died in 1890. In addition, Vittoria and Carmine’s daughter, Annunziata, died in 1868, just shy of her 14th birthday and just days before the birth of Fazio.
IRON-AGE EPILOG 
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