I met Tom in about 1984 through my very good friend Yvonne. He and I became friends as well. I loved his sense of humor, his kindness, his generosity of spirit, his take on the world, and his enjoyment of argument. We argued a lot, and we shared a love of writing. He reminded me of the boy at the parade who pointed out that the King wasn't wearing any clothes. I loved him, and I miss him. He was a mensch.
I thought some of you would be interested in reading a short Short Story he wrote and sent me about a month ago. It's called "Be There Now."
Love to you all,
Jeannie
BE THERE NOW
"Dear Mr. President,
Sir, I realize the Secretary has already apprised you in general terms of the shocking realizations the Bureau of Demographics has been dealing with for the past few weeks, but he asked me, as the most senior analyst to augment what he has told you. Before I begin, I want you to know that on my desk before me right now, is my letter of resignation. I will submit it at the first word from you or the Secretary. My tenure in the Bureau dates to the late 1960's, I, more than anyone, should have been aware of what was happening. I have failed my country, and I have failed you, Mr. President. I will carry the responsibility and the shame of that realization with me for the rest of my life. Sir, it was I that supervised the Bureau’s study group back in 1975, that produced the now-infamous document that so confidently predicted that by the year 2000 the population of our nation would finally reach its peak at the 250 million mark, and that we would begin our long, long journey back down to sustainable numbers. Numbers that did not exceed the carrying capacity of the land. Of course, all through the late 80's and into the 90's, the senior staff in the Bureau watched the rising numbers with alarm and bafflement. It was clear we would push right past 250 million and head on to 400 million and beyond. Mr. President, everything had been in place! ZPG had taken off like few social movements in our history, birth control usage of all types was up several hundred percent, elective sterilization was up even more, and many were postponing parenthood to such a distant future time that everyone knew it would just never happen. Yet, the population continued its perilous climb. No one could explain it. The sheer numbers of human beings threatens many primary values. Indeed the very “pursuit of happiness” is threatened by our inexorably rising population. And the really bad news has been that there was no end in sight. Something was terribly, terribly wrong, and we simply could not comprehend what it was. We have the world’s very best researchers and statisticians in the Bureau, Sir. They can take none of the responsibility for what truly has been my thirty five years of blindness. I failed to provide my superb staff with competent direction in this area. It took a fresh recruit, right out of college, to see what had been staring me in the face for nearly my entire tenure here. Clark Bladderwort is the young man’s name, sir. He is truly a demographic prodigy – and, a national treasure. I understand he was plotting population trends with his Etch-A-Sketch when he was still in kindergarten. I’ve recommended to the Secretary that he be put on the fast track of career advancement in the Bureau. Young Mr. Bladderwort had an inkling of the problem when he was still in high school, but it took his status as a Bureau analyst for him to access sufficient investigative power to confirm his suspicions. Sir, the population trends began deviating from our projections in the mid 1970's. This was the period that we expected to begin to see the fruits of the attitudinal changes that were taking place in the society. Mr. Bladderwort’s genius penetrated deeper than the superficial changes the rest of us were following to the profound philosophical transformations that were taking place simultaneously. As a child, he began to plot the deep philosophic assumptions of the society against the actual movement of population numbers. Something those of us from the more nuts and bolts tradition of the demographics sciences had never considered. He intuited, brilliantly and correctly, that there was something much deeper than the phenomena all the rest of us were tracking. In his first week on the job, Sir, he subpoenaed the records (with my blessing) of the American Psychiatric Society. They compile very general data, Sir, that excludes the records of individual patients, so no one’s privacy was compromised. He had seen something, Mr. President, something that I assure you will, at long last, change our lives – for the better. Just prior to the unexpected rise in population in the mid 1970's, there had been a deep philosophical and cultural shift which was followed almost immediately by a watershed change in psychiatric and psychotherapeutic practices, and our wide-ranging thinker of a young analyst, Mr. Bladderwort, zeroed right in on it and pegged it as the cause of the out of control demographics disaster we’re facing now. The cultural shift, from what we’ve been able to gather, began without malicious intent. A young psychology professor – a protege of the discredited Timothy Leary by the name of Richard Alpert wrote what many considered a “fun little book” with the cryptic title “Be Here Now.” The book, which certainly was written with tongue in cheek, nonetheless found a ready audience of believers among Leary’s followers in the waning days of the hippie movement. As the hippies grew up and moved back into the mainstream lifestyle of their parents’ generation, they took with them this “harmless” little idea, be here now. The idea propagated throughout the subculture-cum-mainstream, and, via some kind of cultural osmosis, was soon taken up by psychologists and psychiatrists, who began to offer it as a routine aspect of their services. Sir, I must state emphatically – at this point, it appears there was no criminal intent. It seems that at the outset a version of mass hysteria was taking hold of the community of mental health professionals. They were seeing what they had already come to believe. The criminal action – the crime against humanity – began more than a decade later. Subpoenaed records show beyond a shadow of a doubt, Mr. President, that by the early 1980's the APA was fully aware of the trouble they were brewing. Form that time on we have clear evidence of a highly orchestrated conspiracy to maintain the status quo. It seems that the criminal activity was driven by two motivations: the prevention of an enormous public relations embarrassment, and, the perpetuation of therapeutic practices that had become phenomenally lucrative for the therapists. As to motive number one. Not a single double blind, peer reviewed study has ever been undertaken to demonstrate the psychological value of living in the present!! Mr. President, the suppression of this single piece of information is almost certainly the most scandalous bit of scientific malfeasance since the Piltdown Hoax – but with far more tragic consequences. Interviews with APA insiders, who have come forward in exchange for immunity from prosecution, have laid out the broad outline of the situation for us. Up until the universal acceptance of the Be Here Now life style, perhaps fifty percent of us – even more in selected sub-cultures, were living somewhere other than the present. For the vast majority of us, that meant some distant past. Sir, the implications for even the most mundane of our current, and, unmanageable crises – traffic, for instance – are enormous. You remember, I’m sure, the fact that gridlock as a cultural reality simply did not exist in the forties, fifties, and sixties. Most people were not present!! And, there’s that unseen before malady of modern times – obesity. Our physiologist consultants tell us that approximately thirty percent of daily calorie intake used to be diverted to the huge physiological and psychological effort of living somewhere other than the present. Sir, all those calories are now contributing to diabetes and heart disease. Be Here Now is overwhelming our health system. As you well know, Sir, our burgeoning population has made the attainment of all of our social goals – improved education, environmental protection, crime reduction, elimination of poverty, ad infinitum – virtually impossible. But the sheer numbers are only the most obvious aspect of the problem. Our informants have confirmed for us what many what many of us demographers have known for some time: a very great many people inhabiting the present simply do not have the qualifications to be here. The present has a set of issues and complexities that are manifestly beyond the comprehension – or the caring -- of the bulk of the population. People are acting out childhood fantasies of power and wealth that are pushing us right to the brink of survival. Sir, these people need to be back in the safe confines of their childhood playrooms and backyards where they can get those urges out of their systems! It’s not just unfair to us, it’s unfair to them to cajole them to live in the here and now. They have some honest growing up left to do. The Bureau is taking no position on the question of the prosecution of officials in the APA. We assume the Justice Department, in consultation with the White House, will determine what is in the nation’s best interest in this regard. We do feel, however, that APA expertise may be invaluable in designing a strategy to alleviate the situation they have created. Preliminary suggestions include the following:**Massive funding allocations to film industry corporations who undertake the production of nostalgia films. **Subtle but pervasive propaganda (I’m sorry, Sir, but at this time, there’s no point in using politically correct terminology) peppered throughout the speeches you give as you travel the country, as well as the encouragement of any and all who have captive audiences – ministers, as an example, to recall with fondness – the good old days. **A greater emphasis in school history classes on the glory of the past. The come-clean, forthright attitudes of many modern teachers who seem to revel in finding villainy and mischief in the past must be discouraged. Sir, we’ve done some preliminary field testing of some ideas like these and have been gratified by the results. In one elementary school district, for example, where several, admittedly, very intensive nostalgia policies have been enacted, enrollment has declined already by an encouraging four and a half percent. The really fortunate thing is that there seems to be some sort of relativistic or quantum effect in play here – something our theorists explain by reciting crypto-paradoxical poetry – they say there’s no other way to explain it – but nobody seems to miss the kids. Not the teachers, not the remaining kids, not even the parents. And here’s more: we did a focus group testing of an extremely positive nostalgia movie set in the 1950's, saturated with powerful subliminal messages. We showed the movie to a selected group of one hundred adults. Sir, only ninety four remained by the end of the film! Again, no one noticed. Wives didn’t even remember that they were married. Husbands claimed they had never heard of the women that entered the theater as their wives not two hours earlier.Needless to say, Sir, we at the Bureau have high hopes. We want to go beyond film to television – we know we can saturate the country much more rapidly this way and put this terrible situation behind us once and for all. We will, of course, advise you of the nights our programs will be aired, and further advise you to keep your own television set turned off for the entire evening. And the APA is being very cooperative. They have sent out urgent letters to all their membership informing them of the lack of evidence for their be-here-now therapies. And they are encouraging their membership to help their clientele to recall the glory days of their youth, and to gloss over those problematic “childhood issues.” To repeat, Sir, I await your word on the submission of my letter of resignation. If you do request me to follow through on this, I will more than likely return to my college days – perhaps take that one additional course in information analysis – and perhaps become a better demographer. And, I suppose, I could lose a few pounds.
Your Sincere Public Servant,
Theodore Thorndike, Ph. D.Senior Analyst, Bureau of Demographics
the embankment from the road, in the midst of the shadows, there, “like an angel standing in a shaft of light,” was a beautiful lily plant. I thought of Friday’s request and decided that “maybe” Tom was pointing it out to me. I stopped, went back and climbed down to take a picture of the lily. It made me smile a sad but satisfying smile thinking of Tom.
