The release of and acclaim for the “Black Panther” movie along with recent interest in black radical movements brought back vivid memories from my late 1960s college days in Berkeley when the newly organized Black Panther Party was a strong presence in nearby Oakland.  In particular I was reminded of the following rather odd encounter.

During one of those sunny spring mornings in a room I’d rented high in the Berkeley hills, I received an unexpected phone call from Greil Marcus, long time friend and Rolling Stone magazine editor who lived just around the corner. 

As you may have heard, during recent discussions on America immigration policy, President Donald J. Trump exclaimed that what the U.S.A. truly needs is not more people from “shithole” countries like those in the Caribbean, South America and Africa, but newcomers from “Norway.”  When I heard this I thought to myself, “Hey, I know some Norwegians!  I should let them know about a fabulous opportunity that awaits them.”  After all, my own grandmother came to the States from Norway in the late 19th century after the family fishing boat was lost at sea with her father and brothers aboard.   The remaining family members sent poor teenaged “Lina” to live with an aunt in Spokane.  Hence, I myself am part Norwegian and we’ve flourished here.

To my way of thinking, this is the by far the best political photo of the 21st century so far, one that shows an increasingly common relationship between authoritarian figureheads and their crowds of adoring followers who “participate” through smartphones and social media. 

In the fall of 1962 at about the time I arrived on the University of California Berkeley campus as a freshman, a Bay Area newspaper contained the headline: “Hopeless Cripple Attends UC Classes.”  The news report concerned a new student, Ed Roberts, a young man from the Bay Area who had been stricken with polio in his youth, a disease that left him quadriplegic and in need of a respirator. Earlier the university had admitted Ed’s dossier but not his person.  As one campus administrator observed, “We’ve tried cripples before and it didn’t work.” [1]  But Roberts and his family persisted, overcoming the resistance of the university officials and state bureaucrats who recognized that he was qualified, but maintained that the campus was simply not equipped to educate someone confined to a wheel chair.

Ongoing attempts to rebrand the geological epoch in which we live have produced a number of impressive suggestions. The conventional term, “Holocene,” is admittedly fairly drab, perhaps in need of a colorful upgrade.  Derived from the Greek holos, it simply means the “whole” or “entire period” beginning at about 11,700 years ago, a period of interglacial warming.  Two appealing alternatives are “Homocene” and “Anthropocene,” both of which evoke the planetary effects of human activity over the centuries.