Eminent Hipsters (9781101638095) (3 page)

Lately I'll be sitting at the piano and find myself picking out one of those tunes from
Peter Gunn
, one of the sweet boppy numbers, or “Days of Wine and Roses” (great changes), or even “Moon River.” And I'll start thinking about a late summer sun setting over fifteen hundred identical rooftops and my family and bop glasses and Holly Golightly, about being lonesome out there in America and how that swank music connected up with so many things. Maybe I ought to get my bongos out of the attic. And in case I've given you the impression that Mancini isn't a totally happening dude, I offer you a maxim from his excellent textbook on arranging and orchestration,
Sounds and
Scores
, concerning the professional's obligation to avoid falling behind the times, musically speaking:

The milk of the sacred cows has a way of turning sour.

Not yours, my man. The sides you carved were strictly, like, young.

It was all on the tube: Khrushchev's shoe, the Cuban Missile Crisis,
Sputnik
, all that stuff. One Sunday night in 1956, the
Ed Sullivan
Show
featured an animation called
A Short Vision
by British filmmakers Peter and Joan Foldes. The film showed the effects of a hydrogen bomb explosion on humans and animals, complete with graphic renderings of the melting faces of men, women, an owl, a deer . . . Broadcast without warning on a family show that usually featured acrobats, puppets, comics and musical acts like Kate Smith and Jimmy Durante, it scared the living shit out of every kid in the country. When I arrived at school the next day, girls were still crying and teachers were grim faced. Of course, the tough kids (the soon-to-be “hoods” and “hitters”) thought the whole thing was hilarious. I suppose the beatings they got from their alcoholic fathers had immunized them against easy sentiment.

Sometime later, I started reading science fiction magazines. Many of the stories had post–World War III themes. By age fourteen, I had entered a phase where I fancied myself a sort of proto–Mad Max. I equipped myself with one of those GI utility belts, a canteen and a bowie knife, everything I needed to survive on a postapocalyptic Terra. It was every man for himself, bwah.

Man is something to be surpassed.

—Nietzsche

1

I was twelve, and the Science Fiction Book Club had just sent me my first monthly selection, Anthony Boucher's two-volume anthology,
A Treasury of Great Science Fiction
. There was this one story by Philip K. Dick called “The Father-Thing”: An eight-year-old boy, Charles, knows that the sullen, soulless thing that looks like his father isn't really his father. It so happens that the bogus dad, having just emerged from an egg deposited in the garage by a buglike alien, has eaten out his real father's insides and taken his place. Charles tries to warn his mother, but of course she doesn't believe him. With the help of two neighborhood pals, Charles destroys the extraterrestrial bug, the Father-Thing and a couple more eggs containing the partially developed simulacra of Charles and his mother. The kids have saved the world from an alien takeover. A 1956 film based on a Jack Finney novel,
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
—the one featuring Kevin McCarthy and a town invaded by pod people—was another take on the same scary idea.

Contrary to all the popular depictions of the fifties as a time when teens danced on the counters of a thousand pastel-dappled soda shops to the sounds of twangy guitars, the decade was, in fact, characterized by a nail-biting paranoia. The Father-Thing and Finney's Body Snatchers played off the fear of discovering a Commie trained in the art of mind control behind every hedge. In a way, the suspicion that one's neighbor might
be one of those nefarious Reds was even more disturbing than the threat of thermonuclear war.

The Father-Thing, though, affected me on a much more personal level. My father had just moved the family from North Jersey to the housing development on the Central Jersey flats. As we drove to the new house on the day of the move, I had tried (as I'd tried many times before) to dissuade my parents from making this terrible mistake. This time I played all my cards, reminding them that we were cutting ourselves off from our extended family back in Bergen County, from my uncles, aunts and cousins; that a change of schools would irreversibly disrupt my academic trajectory; and that the place they'd chosen to live, this “Kendall Park,” was an accursed wasteland that would suck the life out of our heretofore vital family and transform it into a cryptful of mindless zombies, and so on. Sadly, my appeal fell on deaf ears.

At this point, I should probably disclose that, in truth, both my parents, though not without their eccentricities, were basically a couple of sweethearts. My dad, like a lot of Depression-bred ex-GIs, was simply looking to plunk his family down on a clean, safe green patch that was within his means. Nevertheless, at the time their rotten little bookworm of a son saw the move as a grand betrayal. In fact, I began to imagine that this was only the latest in a series of metamorphoses that was gradually transforming my parents into . . .
Parent-Things
.

•   •   •

I
n an old bleached-out color photo from the late thirties, my mother is standing in the sun in a cotton dress, laughing, her curly, reddish brown hair worn long in the style of the era.
Though her days as an entertainer were over, her professional past was still detectable in her good looks and the way she carried herself. But by the mid-fifties, a combination of forces began to effect a curious mutation.

The advent of aerosol hairspray (and the accompanying hairstyles) turned my mother's once silky locks into a rigid, lacquered hive. Around the same time, her flowing cotton print dresses began to be replaced by brightly colored jackets and pants that were apparently made of the same polymeric stuff as the beige carpet that covered almost the entire floor of our house. Despite my protests, I, too, was obliged to deck myself out in a pair of macromolecular “slacks” (beige, natch) for special occasions. Beige was the default color of the decade. The coolest girl in my high school used to throw herself down on her mom's Sahara-colored wall-to-wall carpet and crawl from one side of the living room to the other croaking, “Water . . . Water!”

As a housewife, my mother was the ideal target of the not-so-hidden persuaders of Madison Avenue, and she enthusiastically bought the whole Cold War package. The house always reeked of lemon Pledge. My sister and I drank huge glasses of milk laced with Bosco, except for a couple of exciting months when we switched to those conspicuously toxic “Flav-r Straws.” My mother's cooking schedule really lightened up when she realized she could feed us Swanson's TV dinners (with apple cobbler) and the limp fish sticks of Mrs. Paul. Dessert, anyone? She bought Twinkies and Yodels by the boxload.

More disturbing was my parents' eagerness to assimilate, to blend in with mainstream American society. After all, as
second- and third-generation American Jews, they were already most of the way there—they didn't even look particularly Jewish. On the other hand, I sure did, and my father, unconsciously at least, was determined to deal with it. When he was a kid, his father's paint store had been burned to the ground by homegrown Nazis, and this, combined with the trauma of his wartime experiences, left him with a complicated attitude toward his Jewish identity. It's not that he wanted to hide me in the cellar or anything. But in order to, you know, dial it down a little, he was determined to militarize my appearance until I looked like Flat-Top Joey, our newspaper boy and my father's template for cheerful, obedient, hardworking youth. So, every two weeks or so, in a ritual of supreme humiliation, he'd march me down to the barbershop for a severe crew cut. No matter: no one was ever going to mistake me for Neil Armstrong.

•   •   •

M
y primary doors of escape back then were the piano, contemporary jazz and building plastic models of fighter jets. But, mainly, I read books: the encyclopedia, novels, biography, history and especially sci-fi. In a used-book store in nearby Princeton, I soon found an antidote to “The Father-Thing” in a novel called
The World of Null-A
by A. E. van Vogt (a lot of sci-fi authors seemed to have exotic, musty-sounding names with a lot of initials). One of the strangest pulp creations of all time, it had first appeared as a serial in
Astounding Science Fiction
in 1945 and was published as a hardcover novel in 1948.

Apparently, van Vogt used to wake himself up every ninety minutes so he could write down his dreams. He'd then work the dreams into a narrative until he'd achieved what he liked to
call “pulp music.” Maybe that's why
The World of Null-A
reads like a combination of Raymond Chandler,
Through the Looking-Glass
and
Duck Soup
.

In the year 2560, Gilbert Gosseyn arrives in the City of the Machine to join in the annual competition to determine who tests highest in the skills of General Semantics, a Null-A (non-Aristotelian) discipline that's been adopted as the philosophical foundation of Earth society. The highest scorers get to go to Venus, where an experimental, all-Null-A society has been established. But before Gosseyn gets a chance to show his skills, he's beset by a series of mind-blowing calamities. In the first few pages of the novel, an official lie-detection device informs Gosseyn that he's not who he thinks he is: he's not from a small town in Florida; his wife is not dead, as he believed; in fact, he was never even married. Those are just memories implanted in his brain by an unknown “cosmic chess player.”

A confirmed fraud, Gosseyn is thrown out of his hotel. He meets a girl who turns out to be the woman he thought was his dead wife. He's kidnapped by a gang of conspirators and accused of being an agent of the “Galactic League.” They hook him up to a machine that analyzes his nervous system and then throw him into a dungeon. During an escape attempt, he's cut to pieces by machine-gun fire and, for good measure, fried by an energy beam.

When he wakes up, he's in a Venusian forest, in a spanking-new body, a clone of the original. Thus far, he's been murdered, resurrected in a new body and transported to another planet, but no worries—it's all good: Gosseyn's rigorous training in the mind-body coordination techniques of General Semantics has
rendered him immune to trauma. All he needs to do is take a brief “cortico-thalamic pause,” and he's ready to face the next bizarre plot twist. During the “pause,” a Null-A elite is able to throw off all previous cultural programming and process new sense data from a serene perspective. Eventually, we find out that Gosseyn is actually a mutant, a breakthrough in human evolution, a superbeing with an “extra brain” who's being manipulated by the cosmic chess player in order to combat galactic conspirators who want to wipe out the General Semantics crowd and take over the universe. Got that, chillun'?

Wow, I thought, this is great, immediately realizing that this “cortico-thalamic pause” business could serve as a psychological defense against Parent-Things, Teacher-Things and Life-Things in general. Moreover, like Gilbert Gosseyn, I could be a good mutant and combat the forces of evil throughout the galaxy. But how do I get the training? There was no Institute of General Semantics. It was just something out of A. E. van Vogt's imagination.

Wrong, little Donny. If I'd just done a bit of research, I would've found out that a very real Institute of General Semantics was housed in a country estate in Lime Rock, Connecticut, a few hours' drive from Kendall Park. It seems that van Vogt was using his novel to illustrate his greatest intellectual passion: the system of General Semantics as described in
Science and Sanity
, a very thick book by a jaunty Polish aristocrat, Count Alfred Korzybski.

After serving in the Polish army during World War I, Korzybski decided that people had better find a way to get along with each other. Of course, the same idea had generated
Communism, Fascism, Anarcho-Syndicalism and a hundred other political isms. The Count, though, saw all problems in human relations as problems in semantics, that is, the fact that words mean different things to different people. Moreover,
General
Semantics, his own invention, would also take into account neurological events: the ways in which people reacted to new words, new information and new situations. Confronted with a stressful stimulus, one's reflexes and/or conditioned behavior often preempted the appropriate measured response.

Korzybski wondered whether there was a way to align the cortex, the part of the brain that has dominion over rational thought, and the thalamus, the seat of emotions (hence van Vogt's cortico-thalamic pause). For starters, people had to change the way they perceived and evaluated the world around them. Rather than employ Aristotelian logic—that is, the binary, yes/no, black versus white type of thinking—the Count favored multivalued, pluralistic thought that was modulated by—but not ruled by—subjective feeling. Basically, Korzybski was saying, Hey, be cool: “Don't get mad—get Null-A!”

One of the Count's most quoted sentences is “The map is not the territory.” In other words, don't confuse the word with the object, the description with the thing itself. People who want to sell you something intentionally take advantage of this confusion. For instance, political speeches, TV commercials and Fox News use language rife with “truthiness” instead of truth and contain “factoids” rather than facts.

General Semantics also advances the concept of time-binding: the fact that humans can leave books and recordings and films to transmit knowledge to successive generations
gives them an enormous evolutionary advantage, one that mustn't be squandered. Then there's the related concept of abstraction: when we see an event, we never see its essence, but abstract just a slice of the whole. In order to make use of this knowledge, the Count believed that one must be reeducated to process information with an open mind, with a minimum of unhealthy ego and in a spirit of cooperation, not competition. Although he suggests a number of different learning techniques, one of the most important tools was a discussion group that was part seminar and part group therapy. If you were lucky, the group leader was the Count himself.

If this is starting to remind you of any number of human-potential movements that sprung up during the latter part of the twentieth century, it's no accident. The editor of
Astounding Science Fiction
, John W. Campbell, the man whose vision ushered in the “golden age” of science fiction, was obsessed with the Nietzschean concept that called for a class of supermen at the top of the social hierarchy. When Campbell read Korzybski's book, he envisioned Null-A training as the first step to some sort of actual über-mutancy, and urged his team of writers, including Robert Heinlein, Lester del Rey, L. Sprague de Camp and van Vogt, to work the concept into their stories. Another of his
Astounding
writers, L. Ron Hubbard, had an even better idea: he co-opted some of the Count's more accessible ideas, threw in some basic Freud, and wrote
Dianetics
. In 1950, the charismatic Hubbard even convinced his old pal van Vogt to run his California Dianetics operation. The two pulp writers had a falling-out when Hubbard, dismayed by diminishing sales figures, sweetened the deal by coming up with Scientology, a fanciful, sci-fi religion.