Borderlands USA reaches towards another Frontier, that of Space, with the following book review:

Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Childhood’s End: Where Sci Fi births New Age

In his sci-fi classic from 1953 (revised in 1989), Clarke dabbles dangerously with some of humanity’s worst tendancies.

No doubt, Clarke was a far-sighted, even prescient man. He wrote an article in 1945, “Extraterrestrial Relays,” which is credited with founding communication satellites. His 1951 book, The Exploration of Space, supposedly fired JFK’s imagination to undertake the moon project.

But the launch of his stellar sci-fi career came with Childhood’s End, which arrived with a splash, a futuristic tale in three acts.

In Part I, humanoids – some decades hence from time of writing – are finally visited by an alien race, dubbed the Overlords, whose massive floating air ships and technology dazzle and subdue without a fight. As the end of Chapter 1 warns: “The human race was no longer alone.” [p.5]

It is a Brave New World of sorts. The Overlords remain aloof, never directly themselves for two generations, while whipping the earth into some sort of earthly paradise, where wars are eradicated, hunger eliminated, and most diseases defeated.

How is this achieved? As the opening of an early chapter in Part II, tendentiously titled The Golden Age, explains:

Fifty years is ample time in which to change a world and its people almost beyond recognition. All that is required for the task are a sound knowledge of social engineering, a clear sight of the intended goal – and power. [p.62]

Supervisor Karellen only speaks directly to the U.N. General Secretary, named Stormgen, whom he transports up to the mother ship for occasional chats. Needless to say, Stormgen becomes his ally, while dealing with a few pockets of non-violent resistance, such as one led by the Freedom League. Like a good bureaucrat, Stormgen “had faith in Karellen, and they had not. That was the fundamental difference, and there was nothing he could do about it.” [p.8]

The Freedom League leader argues, “Even Supervisor Karellen, for all his powers, cannot wipe out a thousand years of history at the stroke of the pen” [p.8] and summarizes the League’s demands as “Freedom to control our own lives, under God’s guidance.” [p.9] Good luck with that.

But Karellen intimates that he, too, is but only bureaucrat, working at the behest of others:

I wish people would stop thinking of me as a dictator, and remember I’m only a civil servant trying to administer a colonial policy in whose shaping I had no hand. [p.14]

The heart, then, of the novel’s dramatic flow is this battle of opposing forces, under the unseen, undisclosed hand of an even greater colonizer, named the Overmind. A kind of “cosmic consciousness,” an “Overmind” is later postulated by the likes of the mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin as the “Cosmic Christ” or the “divine in evolution,” and writers such as Terence McKenna and Philip K. Dick as the Logos or VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence).

The benign reign of the Overlords – which we learn was instigated to save the human race from planetary and/or self destruction – ushers in a “Golden Age,” a heaven on earth if you will. “By the standards of all earlier ages, it was Utopia. … Production had become largely automatic: the robot factories poured forth consumer goods in such unending streams that all the ordinary necessities of life were virtually free” [p.64] and “Life was more leisurely than it had been for generations.” [p.65]

With such materialistic bliss, the Freedom League, among others, never had a chance. But other transformations accompany:

Profounder things had also passed. It was a completely secular age. Of the faiths that had existed before the coming of the Overlords, only a form of purified Buddhism – perhaps the most austere of all religions – still survived. The creeds that had been based upon miracles and revelations had collapsed utterly. With the rise of education, they had already been slowly dissolving…. Humanity had lost its ancient gods: now it was old enough to have no need for new ones. [pp.66-67]

What else makes the age “Golden”? It is the peace of One World Governance – the dream of every U.N. bureaucrat and most Leftists – whose seeds had already been planted: “Even before the Overlords came to Earth, the sovereign state was dying.” [p.36]

The Golden Age is, no less, the resurrected Age of Reason:

The age of reason, pre-maturely welcomed by the leaders of the French Revolution two and a half centuries before, had now really arrived. This time, there was no mistake. [p.103]

No mistake? Yet, it is noted, with such material bliss comes some downside. Indeed, Part III, titled The Last Generation, moves us from Utopia, inevitably, to a kind of happy Dystopia – whee, we get to evolve!

When the Overlords had abolished war and hunger and disease, they has also abolished adventure. [p.85]

Not only that, the arts wilted, and even scientific advances halted – why bother, in the face of the Overlords’ “overwhelming intellectual power” [p.10]?

As the leader of a (pacific) rebel community, called New Athens, put it:

Was it possible, he sometimes said to himself, that despite all their enormous intelligence the Overlords did not really understand mankind, and were making a terrible mistake from the best of motives? Suppose, in all their altruistic passion for justice and order, they had determined to reform the world, but had not realized that they were destroying the soul of man? [p.139]

Indeed, the plot had already thickened when the Overlords decided humanity was mature enough – after fifty plus years of social engineering and conditioning – to see what they actually looked like:

There was no mistake. The leathery wings, the little horns, and barbed tail – all were there. The most terrible of all legends had come to life, out of the unknown past. [p.61]

Clark had ended his prior short story “Guardian Angel” – from which Childhood’s End was expanded – with this surprise, this jolt of the Devil as a benign alien. One recalls that many cults, including Madame Blavasky’s Theosophical Society, looks upon Lucifer as the true Angel of Light, who liberated mankind – rather than enslaved it – when Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

Indeed, the novel’s very title, Childhood’s End, remits to the child-like innocence of mankind in the Garden of Eden. To extend the parallel, is free will still free when Clockwork Orange-level (if non-violent) conditioning leads humanity down a primrose path?

So why is Act III, or Part III, titled The Last Generation? The novel’s dramatic tension (what are the aliens up to?) is resolved by the transmogrification of all of earth’s children into the Overmind – making all missed-boat adults the “last generation” who either suicide or fade away after all children are removed. (This was the motive of sending the Overlords to save humanity from self-destruction: to preserve them long enough for this cosmic evolution.) Herein the novel takes a very dark turn.

As Christian author Carl Teichrib, in his comprehensive book titled Game of Gods, points out:

Roughly twenty years later Russian theosophical thinker, P.D. Ouspensky, described “cosmic consciousness” as “trans-humanizing a man into a god.” What was being described from an esoteric position was a type of Singularity, a point when spiritual technique ushers in a planetary transformation, and a time when Man ceases being human on the evolutionary path. [p.454]

Clark, an English futurist, brings quite a bag of tricks to his visioning. Not only does he envision/anticipate space travel, jet transport, and 5-minute Door Dash, but warns of the risks of 3 hours (!) of daily entertainment binges, and the equivalent of Universal Basic Income – not to mention the Singularity-risk of technology staging a coup, as Hal tries to do in Clark’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

But the question remains, does Clark view his sci-fi fantasy as a dystopic warning of mankind’s future from the mishandling of scientific advances (necessitating adult, or alien, intervention) or as an utopic evolution which is all but inevitable? If we are all (or destined to be) little gods – as the Devil promises Eve in the Garden – then why not welcome our absorption into the Divine Universe, to grow up if you will?

Clark revised his 1954 fantasy in 1990 and added both a confusing new prologue and a perplexing statement to the copyright page, “The opinions expressed in this book are not those of the author.” In the prologue, he explains this was to counter the Overlord’s admonition that “The stars are not for Man” – when he, Clark, was all about the stars being for Man. Later on, in several letters and public statements, he distanced himself from the novel’s thrust, extending his copyright-page caveat to the fantasy’s cataclysmic ending – where the most sympathetic characters are the Overlords who, alas, are stuck in an evolutionary cul-de-sac and childless.

Yet it is hard to believe his disclaimer was his intention from the start. Clark was a professed Buddhist who hated organized religion, so it is not difficult to view the book as a treatise on Eastern Mysticism as absorbed into New Age thinking – and its All-is-One mind-meld. The book was written soon after the trauma of two World Wars, amidst the euphoria of the creation of the United Nations (as our terrestrial savior). In this view, the Overlord’s “overwhelming intellection power” with which to rule the rubes of humanity via “social engineering” is every U.N. bureaucrat’s wet dream.

This is a philosophically confused novel, with its theology equally muddled. It turns out the Overlords “would serve the Overmind because they had no choice, but even in that service they would not lose their souls” while humans are “destroying” theirs. What does the word soul even mean to an avowed atheist such as Clark?

Lastly, Clark’s vision is perhaps the most pro-Colonialist work of his time. If Supervisor Kerellen is only benignly “ a civil servant trying to administer a colonial policy,” then what keeps the smarter of us, in Darwin’s Survival of the Fittest, from colonizing lesser civilizations?

Unhappily, the sensation of Clark’s inaugural book in mid 20th century not only cemented his fame but accelerated Western Civilization’s decline into secular and anti-Christian beliefs, while elevating the “expert” or “intelligent” bureaucrat from childhood to near idolhood.

I would like to believe that Clark eventually came to the light and saw the dangerous, authoritarian impulses glorified in his fantasy – but his life trajectory argues otherwise. Rather, his late disclaimers imply he didn’t have the confidence in his own twisted beliefs.

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Check out my review of this pioneer classic, My Ántonia, which is both relevant and urgent to today.

My Ántonia, The Populist, Pioneer Classic Revisited – Miami Independent

The Garden of Eden, of Lucas, Kansas, is one of the most evocative roadside attractions in the U.S.

Built in 1907 by Civil War Veteran Sam Dinsmoor, it is also the country’s oldest intact folk art complex.  At times called Visionary or Outsider art, it displays an elaborate set of editorial cartoons in cement, or “modern civilization as I see it,” according to Dinsmoor.  But then he also warns, “I am bughouse, good and proper, but not on religion, perpetual motion or any other fool thing that I cannot find out one thing about.”

I visited one November afternoon not long ago, having driven 500+ miles out of my way.  Who, then, is more “bughouse”?  It was more than worth the drive.

(These detours were inspired by John Beardsley’s wonderful Gardens of Revelation: Environments by Visionary Artists, covering 25 such environments world-wide, a majority in the U.S.  While not situated close to the geographic borderlands, I decided that such artistic and spiritual creations are so far out of the mainstream, they reside in borderlands of the mind.  Truly, outsider art.)

“Samuel Perry Dinsmoor was born on March 8, 1843, in Ohio.  He served in the Civil War as a nurse in the Union Army.  After the war, Dinsmoor returned to Ohio and soon joined the Masonic Lodge.  Joining this organization was a significant development in his philosophical outlook on life…”

Quotations are from “Pictorial History of The Cabin Home in Garden of Eden” by S.P. Dinsmoor, reprinted by Friends of S.P. Dinsmoor’s Garden of Eden, 2002

The Good Lord Bird by James McBride
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

The Good Lord Bird is an example of an overhyped (National Book Award winner), deeply flawed contemporary title, which the PC-mavens must adore for it potential virtue-signaling, as I can’t think of another reason. This wreckage of a book is why I tend to avoid contemporary literature: the more lazy the thinking, the more it is lauded. The novel is a fictionalized account of John Brown leading up to the fateful raid at Harper’s Ferry, which many believe tipped the nation into civil war.

Our protagonist, Henry Shackleford, aka Henrietta, aka Onion, is a tween slave in Kansas suddenly freed during a John Brown raid, who is then swept up into the abolitionist crew, with which he has no real sympathy. Among other things, his father was killed during the raid.

John Brown, often called the Old Man by the narrator, mistakes Henry for a girl, a slave-era fiction that perpetuates until book end. (McBride encourages a facile parallel: of the black person’s/slave’s similar inability to be her/his true self.) In the midst of the raid’s confusion, it starts this way:

But the Old Man heard Pa say ‘Henry ain’t a,’ and took it to be ‘Henrietta,’ which is how the Old Man’s mind worked. Whatever he believed, he believed. It didn’t matter to him whether it was really true or not. He just changed the truth till it fit him. He was a real white man. [p.20]

(By book’s end, one has to wonder if the author and Brown have this truth-changing in common…)

The narrative and actual, tragic story is played for laughs throughout. Part I “Free Deeds (Kansas)” seems like one extended joke, on the Onion’s transgendering-for-survival. Tiresomely, the joke extends to the end.

In one memorable scene, Frederick Douglass is spoofed as a horny old buggerer after our young Henrietta’s tail:

Well, all that tinkering and squeezing and savaging made me right nervous, ‘specially since he was doing it his own self, squeezing and savaging my arse, working his hand down toward my mechanicals as he spoke the last, with his eyes all dewy, so I hopped to my feet.” [p.245]

John Brown, the erstwhile historical subject of the entire production, is also played for laughs. You see, he’s a obsessive Jesus-freak who prays at uproaring lengths (before, during, and after both battles and meals, often getting cold) and uproaringly gets his Bible verses all twisted and wrong.

Our Henrietta, who learns his letters on the sly during his several year captivity in Missouri (along the border of Slave and Free States), pokes fun at the tongue-twisted and Bible-befuddled Brown throughout – most memorably calling him “off his biscuit.” That is, until he comes to Jesus himself (a gunshot wedding, if you will, at Harper’s Ferry) and ends up idolizing the Old Man.

After troopsing his rag-tag band around the new territories for some time, the Old Man sets his sights back east, on the nation’s largest arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in Virginia. Onion records the distaste for the Old Man even in the Free States, where he is (correctly) seen as a loose cannon and murderer.

But by narrative’s end, Henrietta has come around mightily to the whole charade, claiming, “John Brown was a Christian man. A bit off his biscuit, but a better Christian you never saw.” (Really? Extra-judicial murder?) And, in the next paragraph, admits, “It [Harper’s Ferry] set the table for the war that was to come, is what it did, for nothing scared the South more than the idea of niggers running ‘round with guns and wanting to be free.” [p.450] It is generally believed that Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry radicalized the young nation’s divides, all but eliminating the potential for compromise or gradual transformation and “set the table” for over 700,000 deaths.

Unless you agree with Henry’s full conversion to the cause – at the end he likens Brown’s wrinkled countenance to “the face of God” and earlier on slips into calling God the “Old Man” – or the book’s tortured premise that John Brown is, OK, not God-like, but to be worshipped up there with Lincoln, then you might wish to give this book a pass.

Beside the hackeyed premise, on a written narrative level the book suffers from several defects. The extended jokes for one. Completely unnecessarily, it is twice as long as needed. The narrative voice is inconsistent and confusing. While a prologue sets up the narrative as a verbal history given, as a mature (103 year old) adult, to another member of the First United Negro Baptist Church of Wilmington, DE, the narrative voice starts out much like that of a tween or young teen. Only later do some more adult-like observations jar and distance the reader. The author can’t resist puns, such as “incog-Negro” [p.230], which seem more contemporary and clever than what the 103-year-old Henry would say in the earliest 20th century.

Finally, the title’s metaphoric bird undergoes some torturous transformations during the narrative. We are told the manuscript is found with a “rare feather from an ivory-billed woodpecker, a nearly extinct species,” presumably belonging to the Good Lord Bird of the title. It turns out the bird has magical properties to John Brown, who treats it reverentially, as a protecting spirit. Soon enough, these protective properties are transferred by Brown to the Onion, who becomes a good luck charm, a good omen child, to the outlaws. But, at the novel’s predictable end, the author has thrown the feather back on the Old Man’s back. Here in John Brown’s fictionalized words:

The Good Lord Bird don’t run in a flock. He flies alone. And when he sees that tree, that dead tree that’s taking all the nutrition and good things from the forest floor. He goes out and gnaws at it, and he gnaws at it till that thing get tired and falls down. And the dirt from it raises the other trees. [p.456]

In case it is not obvious, the metaphor of John Brown gnawing at the dead tree of Slavery is, two pages on, extended to a general observation on the need for lumber-jack revolutionaries, in this sighting over “a colored church”:

And up above the church, high above it, a strange black-and-white bird circled ‘round, looking for a tree to roost on, a bad tree, I expect, so he could alight upon it and get busy, so that it would someday fall and feed the others. [p.458]

Squawk!

Yawn.

[The Good Lord Bird, James McBride, Riverhead Books (The Penguin Group), New York, paperback edition, 2013]

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“Maine, along with Florida, is the most geographically isolated of the lower forty-eight, which may explain its agelessness. Although only the 11th largest, it feels massive by northeastern standards, and wild beyond this New Englander’s imagination, the wildness compounded by a sense of enormity – and isolation.” p.25, Borderlands USA

A family reunion led me back to the relatively busy mid-coast region of Sebasco, the water frigid, the weather wonderfully variable.  [please hover over images for captions]

“It would take most of a week and well over one thousand miles – the length of all Central America – to partially ring Maine, one of the profound surprises of my trip.” p.26

Come explore the wilds of our northern border with Canada.

Long heralded as the longest peaceful (since 1813 or so) border in the world, it also boasts unimaginable wilderness and a handful of wild, out-of-the-way National Parks.  [please hover over images for captions]

Not long ago, dense forest was everywhere. As de Tocqueville wrote in his 1831 A Fortnight in the Wilderness:

If we had indeed only wanted to see forests, our hosts in Detroit would have been right in telling us that we need not go very far, for, a mile out of town, the road goes into the forest and never comes out of it.

Coastal Maine is like no other in the States.  Austere. Cold. Foggy. Mega-tidal.  The water in September is winteresque.  I spent a weekend in Sebasco, south of West Bath, east of Casco Bay, with family, and recalled that Maine in its entirety was one of the greatest discoveries of my trip around the borderlands.  It is the remotest and most different state of the East Coast – and feels very northern.  [please hover over images for captions]

See the neglected northern border in its full glory.  Shots supplement those in the Borderlands USA color ebook.  [please hover over images for captions]