Thanks For The Life

I was twenty-one, finishing a degree under a special deal with the school that let me hang around the apartment all day, just reading and taking notes. But I had pissed off my dad and needed money, so I sent a resume to the address in the paper. One day the phone rings and it’s Cumberland Farms convenience store. Some old lady on the other end, maybe fifty, seems to be having the worst day of her life. It’s all in the tone: “Is this John Kilgore?” like she’s troubleshooting a bad smell. We decide pretty quick that Cumberland Farms is not the path to my future.

But ten minutes later she calls back, pleasant enough. Come on down, ask for Dollie.

It turned out her supervisor made her make that second call. She didn’t want no spoiled college boy messing up the store she’d worked so hard to turn around. But he insisted, lucky for me.

When I get there there’s no old lady, just a pretty girl on a ladder, putting up a sign on the back cooler. “I need to speak to Dollie,” I tell her. She says, “That would be me, love,” like she’s British. That week or that month she was going through some phase where she called almost everyone “love.” Little kids from the neighborhood, old winos, her boss. Or maybe there was a little more to it. After that first one popped out when she saw me, she had to cover for it, so she used it on everyone while I was around. 

In a month we were staying mostly at her place, three exits down I-95 and a couple of right turns. Even in those days sleeping with the help was not a good career move, so she had the supervisor rotate me to another store a few miles away. We would stand at the registers in our separate stores, phones cradled on our shoulders, smoking 100-millimeter cigarettes, and just talk and talk. But we rang up customers with such speed and accuracy that no one ever complained. We were even a little competitive about it. We both memorized common combinations of items and rang them as one figure to save time, explaining if we had to. 

We went back to look at that first store maybe four decades later and couldn’t find it at first. We both remembered it as a barn, a gym, a Walmart, because it stood for so much I guess. In fact it was hardly a shack, sitting there closed on the corner in a bombed-out looking neighborhood with trash in the streets. Impossible to figure how so much experience had ever fit into that small space.

Back then I was too self-centered to get anyone’s story, but I gradually got hers. She grew up early and quick, hungry sometimes, family living in a car sometimes. Polio as a baby, left her with a slight limp. A drunk loser mother, no dad, monster stepfather. Tight as a tick with a brother, a sister, cousins, a grandmother who was the only adult who ever looked out for her. Out of the house at fifteen and the next year into a cushy government job, top secret actually, where she made glass for infrared gunsights for Vietnam. Got badly hurt doing that and wouldn’t go back, so then into the manager trainee program at Cumberland Farms, where she was a real star. Management loved her, the neighborhood loved her. She took over the wrecked Ferry Street store, cleaned it up, and instantly tripled sales. 

By the time I came aboard she was making a killer commission, plenty for a car, the apartment, cigarettes (no booze), and being a soft touch. Feminism was just starting to be a thing, and without question she was on the track to upper management. Until she met a guy and deserted her own life to work on his. Back then I had problems with drugs, depression, and mainly just a huge lack of common sense. Couldn’t seem to connect with the world or take anything real from it. Book smart and life stupid. Crazy ideas would take hold of me every so often and I would have to see them through, even knowing I shouldn't.

She didn’t care about any of that, all that mattered was that we were together. Where she came from men hit women, cheated on them, drank the grocery money. Just avoid any of that and I would be golden. A low bar, to use a phrase we didn’t have then. We had a sort of secret deal where we both pretended I was the one who knew things, when really it was always her.

I couldn’t seem to piss her off, no matter how many kinds of jerk I was being. Until I finally did piss her off, and then it would be like fighting a badger, a rainstorm, a swarm of bees. You didn’t want to go there.

After New Haven we headed out to California for my grad school. Got married after two years, started family the year after, way sooner than we’d planned. Then up to Washington briefly and on back here to Illinois for a college teaching job that in the first years paid like it was an internship. She didn’t mind any of it, knew how to stretch a short paycheck from here to Sunday. Garage sales, specials, refinancing, budget recipes. She did some more glass-blowing at one point, drove school buses, ran a daycare in our home. Finally she hit on what really worked, going back to school at forty to become a nurse. Three hard years and too much drama, but after that it was Easy Street. She went off to work every day with a big smile. 

So forty-nine years on from that phone call, here I am, still sleeping with the boss. What do you two find to talk about, people sometimes asked in the old days, and I would think, everything under the sun. We’ve made it to all fifty states, mostly hauling a big camper that I sometimes smash into things (she doesn’t mind too much). We got to Korea for a while, Mexico, Canada, the Philippines for a year, England briefly, France barely. We’ve ridden motorcycles and flown hang gliders and camped a whole lot. Had more than one night where I look back and think, God, was that really us? It’s been a great run. 

Five years ago, give or take, we were talking and she said, “I never understood why your folks liked me so quick and so much, the way they did.” I gave a big guffaw. “Are you kidding? They knew I was crazy and didn’t want me living in their basement in my forties.” One of those moments when the truth suddenly just hits you.

It turned out she really did love almost everyone. My whole family. Her own of course, except the mom and the stepdad. Cranky old ladies who reminded her of her grandma. Kids on the Special Ed bus she drove for years, one who died of spinal bifida, one who got killed by a drunk driver. Patients, sometimes the worst ones best. Many friends. Me, inexplicably. Our own kids, so fiercely it just took her over, which is the main reason they grew into the adults I'm so proud of. When my dad was dying she lived with him and Mom for months, running the house and changing his diapers, and never complained. When our granddaughter died she screamed like she’d been shot, and that was maybe the worst moment ever. She still spends most of her day fretting over other people’s needs, driving me a little nuts with it sometimes. She gets everybody’s story at the first meeting, if I’m wondering later I just ask.

Now we’re both old and a little lazy, and too many of the people we care about are gone. She’s sick, I’m cranky and arthritic and more forgetful than ever, but we still get along just great. Since the pandemic sometimes days go by when she’s the only person I see, but mostly she’s the only person I want to see. When we’re out in company I miss half of what gets said, even with the hearing aids she found, but sometimes I check her expression and then I can tell. At home I look puzzled and she tells me, “It’s in the middle cabinet, third shelf on the right,” pissing me off slightly because I haven’t even asked. She always wants to watch TV but never cares what’s on, as long as I’m sitting there with her. 

So happy anniversary, my darling. I don’t know how many more we’ll have, but I know where I want to be. Thanks for all the hard work and tenderness and for fixing my life, again and again. 

 

The Danger Now

 

 

1

After several days of compulsive news following, I think I get it, sort of: how we could be here yet again: how after twenty years of investment and effort and planning, some of it not unintelligent, much of it basically well-meaning, “the greatest military on earth” (as we keep telling ourselves) can find itself unmistakably defeated by a comic opera foe: a bunch of pimply teens and their fatso uncles, in gowns and vests, variously bearded, toting a hodgepodge of Soviet and American weaponry, scowling at the cameras as they settle into the chairs of the former presidential office. How at the bitter end, cruelest of all, we find ourselves powerless even to protect our late friends and allies, constrained to beg for their lives (basically) from the Taliban, those nice guys who always pray, long and heartily, before they shoot a prisoner or rape a child. 

How, how, how? Start with the basics of “exit strategy.” Since the first moments of the invasion in 2001, it has always been official American policy to depart Afghanistan ASAP; the unanswerable questions have always been exactly when, exactly how. How to evacuate an untenable position under fire is a classic textbook problem in military strategy: the trick of letting go of the tiger's tail, when the tiger knows what you want and is just as smart as you are. An open-ended invasion was never an option; failing to assure the world that we were leaving would have undermined other alliances, perhaps even brought on a wider conflict. But a foe who knows your plans already has a huge advantage, and how, exactly, do you let go of that tiger?

So of course the right moment never came. Over the years our expedition morphed and grew from a righteous drive-by focused on catching Osama bin Laden (it never did) and dismantling Al Qaeda (check that, but it’s like eradicating Kudzu or toe fungus), to a mercy mission aimed at jerry-rigging some kind of government to replace the Taliban 1.0 regime we had swept aside, to an exercise in full-out nation building, replete with roads, schools, clinics, elections, and entirely unrealistic promises, explicit and implied.  

So, okay, the mission crept. Could we not simply have gone with that, opportunistically harvesting whatever strange fruit history might offer in this unlikely backwater? I will be haunted by this question. I spent a semester teaching in Korea, a year in the Philippines. In either country, an American visitor readily sees that nation building does not have to fail. Our engagement in the archipelago began as a spasmodic, bloody, late leap into the already discredited European game of colonialism (Mark Twain excoriated McKinley for it in a classic essay, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness”). Over time the power grab evolved into something much more like a partnership, especially during World War II, and the mood there in 1988-89 was on balance firmly pro-American, albeit with some inevitable and bitter family grudges.

And Korea has been a huge success story, though the American public, addicted to set notions of victory, never seems to grasp this. Absent our massive intervention and continued presence over 71 years, the South, overrun by the North in 1950, would have been annexed to a nightmare slave state. Now, instead, it is a vibrant democracy and a keystone of our own national security. The investment has paid off handsomely and keeps on doing so. In 1984 my family and I experienced that rarest of phenomena, gratitude, wherever we went on the peninsula, and it was a wonderful thing.

Then in the yonder, past Vietnam’s huge shadow, are shining examples of spectacular success in rebuilding postwar Germany and Japan. 

So why not stick with the nation-building option? Given the horrors now before us (child “marriage”; reprisal murders; Sharia law; our own humiliation before the world, at vast cost to other alliances), the status quo immediately ante looks  golden. Could we not simply have gone on shoring it up from year to year, playing for time, hoping to turn Afghanistan into Korea over the long haul? 

Richard Haass argued something of the sort last night on The Eleventh Hour. “Biden didn’t have to do anything,” he insisted. Our troop contingent in the country had already fallen to a mere 2500 souls, and we had taken no battlefield casualties for nearly two years. Even the money hemorrhage was slowing. 

I will, as I say, be haunted by this vision of slow continued nation building. But yesterday I heard Fareed Zakaria dismiss it as “fantasy” several times, and finally, reluctantly, I have to agree. Our casualties had fallen so low pursuant to what Barry McCaffrey calls “Trump’s farcical deal with the Taliban.” They were no longer attacking us because they knew we were leaving anyway, sooner not later. The deal let them concentrate on killing Afghans instead. The situation was deteriorating, not stable. But at the first signs that we meant to renege and remain, the gunslinging mullahs would have renewed their attacks. We would have to respond, and our commitment would begin spiraling back toward the 130,000 troops it was at zenith. 

We could stay, but only at huge cost. Three days ago Anthony Blinken, flanked by top advisors George Winken and Sally Nod, explained very uncomfortably that “This is not in our national interest.” As in: sorry, it’s not in my interest to save your life just now. The next day the president, surfing a tsunami of criticism in his stubbornly defiant speech, did rather better in parsing the grim strategic imperatives. We are menaced by terrorism not just in Afghanistan, but all over the globe, and we can’t keep pouring all our resources down this one hole, where their main fruits seem to be corruption and resentment. Honor requires only that we give our friends every tool needed to fight their own fight, and we have done that now several times over. Sayonara.

We were always going to leave. The questions were only when and how.

 

2

 

What, then, of the botched execution of the pull-out? Even friendly commentators have been competing to outdo one another in scorn for this aspect. Monday morning quarterbacking and despondent rue are the order of the day. Why abandon Bagram so early, leaving us with just the one hideously vulnerable airport to use in evacuating citizens and friends? Why the bureaucratic foot-dragging over visas? Why, for heaven’s sake, fail to evacuate our collaborators, all likely murder targets now, before removing any more troops? Why not heed the pessisimistic intelligence forecasts not the optimistic ones? Why, why, why?

These are questions that strike at the heart of the Biden presidency. The mess in toto is exactly the kind of fiasco one expected of Trump, but which he evaded rather miraculously through his years of buffoonery on the high-wire of international relations, till he finally achieved it in spades at home, leaving willful fingerprints all over American history’s second most lethal disaster. But Biden was supposed to have all the opposite strengths: caution, experience, expertise, professionalism, good sense, decency. Yet for the last month or so, he suddenly seems determined to prove out the silly nickname, Sleepy Joe, that Trump tried to hang on him in the election. Writers in The Atlantic, of all places, have been faulting him for hubris, procrastination, callousness (!) and consistently poor judgment. 

But the truth IMO is just this, that when in this case has determined how. Everything else -- the chaos, the heartbreaking TV images, even the seeming bad faith to our friends -- follows from the unforeseen speed of the Taliban’s takeover. When the smoke clears, the question I expect to hear asked with some bitterness is, who, exactly, has betrayed whom here? We were not the ones dickering and dealing, saving our own lives if nothing else, as the Taliban marched unopposed into village after village down-country, then city after city. 

As in Vietnam, the folkloric takeaway for Americans is likely to be, “Those guys just wouldn’t fight,” but that is mostly a foul slander. Casualty figures prove unmistakably that Afghans will fight like the very devil, courageously as you like. But they don’t fight in our ways or for our reasons. Not for home, country, service, distant comrades, our God, or even Mom raised to the level of grand abstraction. Instead they fight for family, tribe, neighborhood, revenge, pride, strictly personal honor, Allah, a vividly expected afterlife, and above all personal survival, adroitly cutting deals as they go, in ways that can strike us as cynical or craven. We knew this about them from the first but somehow never really absorbed the knowledge, never adjusted to what we knew.

Is the administration then guilty only of a huge intelligence failure? Arguably not even that. Some things are just inherently unpredictable: earthquakes, avalanches, tomorrow's stock market close, next year's Super Bowl winner, election results sometimes, the formation of traffic jams, the movement of crowds, and above all, the outcomes of battles, because they depend on the independent calculations and existential choices of countless individuals. Bottom line: absolutely no one could have predicted the speed with which Afghan armed resistance would collapse: not the Taliban, not Afghan troops, not Ashraf Ghani, not Lloyd Austin, not Kreskin. All those Afghanis we saw at the airport on Monday, desperately trying to force their way onto military transports  -- they must have made much the same miscalculation as U.S. Intelligence and everyone else, or they wouldn't have been there. They thought their government could win, or could hold out a little longer, so they stayed until it was too late. They were Asia experts by definition, right there on the ground, but in the end their predictions proved no better than yours or mine. 

In an alternative universe somewhere, government security forces are still gamely holding out. Afghan girls are still getting up in the morning and going to school, fingers crossed, though the nation’s condition is clearly precarious. In yet another universe, Ghani’s troops have routed the Taliban, to universal astonishment. Because all this was possible until suddenly, in our universe, it no longer was. Uncertainty is the essence of the case, the sine qua non of having armed conflict in the first place. If the outcome were already certain, the side destined to lose would simply capitulate with no shots fired. That, actually, is pretty close to what did happen, trapping us there with one finger still caught in the door. But nothing is ever really obvious except in retrospect. What the military calls “cascading failure,” which you and I might call “snowballing” or “the butterfly effect,” can always take any situation in radically different directions. 

Of course you must try to predict and foresee, even though no one is ever very good at it. The Biden administration's Plan A for withdrawal seems to have been premised on the not unreasonable guesstimate that the Afghan army -- three times as large as the Taliban and far better armed -- would hold out for a year or so and might even win. A year would be ample time to evacuate citizens, troops, and friendlies, checking papers zealously to prevent opportunistic visa fraud. Meanwhile, the Pentagon now claims, we kept planning for worse contingencies. But the trouble with such plans is that, taken a hair too far, they can become the signal that triggers panic and CAUSES the defeat we are still hoping to avoid. So they were clearly slow-walked to the back burner. 

The same logic is what often makes generals and statesmen such liars, bereft of the candor so often and piously demanded by the press. Candor in the upper echelons can be a prosecutable crime, because in these contexts words are deeds and make things happen. If you are going to tell a reporter, "This operation has little chance," you might as well start shooting your own people. 

Hence the much-denounced "failure" to evacuate friendlies soon enough: had we attempted it three months ago, the country might well have fallen that much earlier, amid dilemmas identical to those we see now. Anyway many of our former aides and translators, no more soothsayers than anyone else, still wanted to stay at that point. Or so the president says.

Everyone knew that there were grave structural problems in the edifice history and the U.S. and the Afghan people had built in the country. But no one knew if it would really fail, much less when. In the end it came down as suddenly as a Florida condo, in just eleven days, to universal surprise, leaving us in this changed universe. The inexorability of anticipation turns out to have been a huge part of what went wrong. Once Trump, ever hugely self-deceived about his own negotiating prowess, bargained troop levels down from 15,500 to an untenable 2500, the writing was on the airport wall. (Some argue that he was deliberately setting a booby-trap for his successor. That sounds like more strategic thinking than Trump could  muster.) When Biden announced he would honor the bargain, the message was underlined and boldfaced. 

So when collapse began to seem possible over the long term, everyone began to act precipitously in their own interest, and the future wrote itself back into the present with astonishing speed. Soldiers who had once fought bravely now made other arrangements. Cops, clerks, and shopkeepers stopped reporting for work, and guards left their stations. Suddenly next year was today, and the condo had come down around our ears.

So now here we are, as they say. Our bitterly cold comfort has to be that there was never really a choice, or at least no good one. We had to withdraw, it hardly mattered when, and the withdrawal was always going to be chaotic, humiliating, and too fast. A lesson to be deeply remembered the next time we are tempted to a foreign military adventure.

In the aftermath, like everyone else, I find myself riveted by our desperate struggle to get our people out, against long odds. The next act promises to be a continued unbearable train wreck, and our absurd new dependence on the good will (!) of the Taliban to let possible victims through their cordon salts one’s mental wounds. Even so, I have a worse nightmare for the long term. It is that, as Bret Stephens put it in a recent piece, “Failure will follow us home from Afghanistan,” cascading right on back to our own homes and neighborhoods. The whole episode has been an object lesson in the way a distant whiff of failure can transform into the thing itself, suddenly right in your face. 

What if the debacle destroys Biden’s fragile coalition, sinks the infrastructure bill, deep-sixes electoral reform, even keeps him from fighting Covid effectively? What if the much-studied handful of voters who now determine American elections swing back to the Republicans in 2022 and 2024? We have our own homegrown Taliban, well-armed, red-hatted, supremely intolerant, and lately self-goaded into a near ecstasy of vindictive rage. If they come back into power, there will be no C-17s to take us to safety. 

 

 

DEKE KILGORE, 1944-2021

 

D

onald E. Kilgore III of Albuquerque died at Lovelace Medical Center on July 19, peacefully and among family, but overcome at last by the heart disease he had been battling for many years. He was preceded in death by his parents, Don and Julie Kilgore; his birth mother, Lillian Kilgore;  his brother David Kilgore; spouse Anne Tackett; spouse Carole Marrero; and his son Christopher. He is survived by his son, Donald Kilgore IV, of Brooklyn, NY; his stepchildren Kyle and Yvonne Marrero; his loving companion of the last years, Diane Butler of Albuquerque; siblings Susan, John, and Julie Kilgore; his grandchildren Andrew, Jacob, Caitlin, and Dylan; and a lawless horde of nieces, nephews, in-laws, and good friends. 

 

In a long and colorful life, “Deke” Kilgore started several businesses, traveled the world, sold advertising and industrial chemicals, owned and piloted his own airplane, raised two families, and worked as a paperboy, tricycle ice cream peddler, DJ, TV reporter, sales manager, and CEO of a small company. Family was at the center of his life and religion played a strong part, though sometimes in competition with his love of a good time. When an automobile accident left his wife Carole paralyzed and near death, he was her devoted and zealous nurse for a dozen years, turning their living room into a "home ICU,” caring for her around the clock. He also gave generously of himself during the long final illnesses of Don and Julie. After Carole’s passing he found enormous late-life happiness with Diane. Passionate, loving, adventurous, and argumentative, he was emphatic in his political opinions and the first to admit he could sometimes be a weird duck. He will be remembered and missed for his irrepressible offbeat sense of humor, his great decency, and his deep love for people close to him. 

 

LUCKY THIRTEEN

 

 

Wally Funk is going to space! I saw the story last night on CNN and about fell out of my chair. Jeff Bezos will be taking her along on the first manned – should we say populated? – flight of New Shepard, his new private-sector spaceship. It will happen on July 20, just a couple of weeks from now. At 82, she will be the oldest person ever to fly in space.

 

Back in the early sixties, the glorious Kennedy years, the first days of the space race, when I was a kid in Albuquerque, there was a year or two when the most famous, instantly recognizable celebrities in the world were “The Mercury Seven,” the astronauts being trained for America’s first space flights. 

 

People who forget the Cold War context can have a hard time understanding the outsized importance that attached to those early flights. The bad Russians had busted our nuclear monopoly and blockaded Berlin and infiltrated Cuba. They had beaten us into near space with Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin and seemed to have the edge in H-bomb development, reporting surreal kilotonnage after every blast. The space race was supposed to be our chance both to “catch up” with the Soviets and to transform the terms of the competition. Kennedy’s brash 1962 promise to go to the moon within the decade felt like deliverance, at least to nuclear age worry warts like me. A gentleman’s bet in place of a nuclear showdown, Tom Swift in place of Nagasaki and the Bikini Atoll. How could you beat that?

 

So the early space program was no sober investment in emerging technology. It was half propaganda stunt, half crazed hobbyist adventure, half cosmic allegory, and one hundred percent last-ditch rescue mission. The real purpose, widely understood though unstated, was to save the world from nuclear holocaust, by providing this surprisingly gentle alternative. 

 

The Mercury Seven, those pure warriors who were going to save us all, were hugely famous even before their names were known. Every stage of their selection and training got adoring press, and their first flights, at least, usurped programming on all three networks for minute-by-minute coverage. I remember studying an issue of The Weekly Reader, in fifth grade I think, that let us “Meet the Astronauts” long before their mission assignments were even known. A year or two later, the audio from NBC’s coverage of John Glenn’s first orbital flight was piped in through the ancient PA system over the teacher’s desk, and we listened to hour after hour of it as we sat at our desks, working math problems in our spiral notebooks. 

 

In one of the funniest books you will ever read, The Right Stuff (1979), Tom Wolfe portrays the Mercury Program with relentless but exquisitely targeted sarcasm. The astronauts, he never lets us forget, were less pilots than passengers, mainly along for the ride while all the essential decisions took place at Ground Control. Real test pilots, genuine pressure performers like Chuck Yeager (who declined his invitation to the program), tended to sneer at the Mercury cohort, comparing them to Ham, the chimp who appeared beaming on the cover of Life after serving as test animal extraordinaire on one of the last unmanned flights. 

 

But the story NASA and Kennedy were telling required that the astronauts be seen as autonomous heroes, serenely possessed of that macho “stuff” Wolfe writes about. The selection process was designed as a Brobdingnagian commercial for the American people and the American system – its openness, its meticulous meritocratic fairness. A vast public quest to find the best of the best and shoot them at the moon. Perhaps inevitably, it now looks like a locus classicus of white male privilege. The criteria were never strictly mission-related (for what was the mission? Mainly just riding along, hoping not to die), but more semiotic and political. For starters Eisenhower limited the field to military test pilots, and the final group ended up being all male, all white, all Protestant.

 

But the narrative required that the cadre be abundantly and publicly tested. This is where my dad comes into the picture. He was part of a team of physicians at Lovelace Clinic, in Albuquerque, charged with certifying the astronauts as medically spaceworthy, culling the field still further in some cases. Wolfe has a lot of fun with how sketchy the parameters of this mission necessarily were. No one really knew what the physical and mental qualifications for an astronaut should be. Matchless courage of course, but that was cheap, it could be taken for granted in those straitlaced postwar days. But beyond that, what? Even then it seemed clear (as the history of space travel since mostly proves), that the choices are pretty much a) the machinery works and you come back alive; or b) it doesn’t and you don’t. Your resistance to g forces or even your ability to make decisions under stress is unlikely to make much difference.

 

Nevertheless, the doctors at Lovelace did what doctors do: ran lots of tests, recorded lots of data. Dad has a cameo in the book (unnamed, alas) as the physician who shot quantities of freezing water into the astronauts’ ears, then noted their reactions. He had other jobs too, involving everything from treadmills to sensory deprivation tanks to enema bags, and a slightly sardonic attitude about it all that, if you like, confirms Wolfe’s thesis that the tests were more PR events than medical or military ones. 

 

But it was through the testing that Dad met Wally – this Wally, the one in the news just now – and formed a friendship that lasted about five decades. Not long after the Mercury Seven had been selected and certified, to huge fanfare, another cohort was forming in the shadows: “the Mercury Thirteen,” as Martha Ackmann would call them in a book of that name, not published till 2004. (Dad fares a little better there, with several citations in the index.) These were women – women! – who aspired to do what the men were doing, i.e., riding unspeakably large and violent rockets into space and with luck, back. 

Unlike the men, these were not the essentially passive victors in a huge top-down talent search. They were a self-created, self-starting natural elite: women aviators who had bucked the system all their lives, fighting through every kind of gender-based obstacle to pursue their passion for flight. Ipso facto and willy-nilly, all of them were also first wave feminists. Wally was the youngest of the group, just 21 but with an incredible 3000 flying hours already logged. She got into the program by writing a pushy letter to Randy Lovelace, founder and CEO of the Clinic.

 

Women in space! Of course the idea was preposterous, and squarely at odds with the mission. Even the feminists would tell you that wars were started and fought by men, and a multibillion-dollar propaganda surrogate for World War III simply must, by definition, feature men, ours versus theirs, “Russians and Americans facing off in single combat in the heavens,” as Wolfe puts it. The women’s project was out of bounds, beside the point, doomed from the start.

 

But no one seems to have told the women, and some idealistic soul at NASA decided that something might come from the program, or at least that the ladies should be humored for a while. Anyone who has read Lysistrata will know why this was a bad idea, and Ackmann’s fine book richly details the story. The women bonded and communicated, they lobbied and prepared and wrote endless letters. They called on surprisingly influential connections. They refused to be discouraged, and they believed they were meant to go to space. Finally someone at NASA answered one of the long letters, and the group got invited to Lovelace for testing.

 

In an interview he gave around 2005 (the VHS is around here somewhere), Dad, to my lasting pride, says for the record, “The women actually did better than the men on the tests.” Of course, the tests in themselves were never meant to be decisive in the grand contest for the mantle of Ham, the ticket to the galaxy’s ultimate thrill ride. Still, they were revealing, in more ways (obviously) than NASA intended. What happened at Lovelace was what had to happen: the natural elite beat the confected one; the prize bulls got smoked by the band of scrappy mustang fillies. 

 

If this mattered at all, it mattered negatively: finally alert to the magnitude of the danger – that their chosen cast of international space stars might be eclipsed by this band of upstart Amazons – NASA, Lyndon Johnson, and all the guys put the kibosh on the program in 1962. 

 

But Wally (as you will be hearing in the coming weeks) never stopped believing. On her own hook, she fattened her resume with continuing tests, talking her way into a centrifuge ride at USC, wearing a tight merry widow because the government wouldn’t loan her one of the classified G suits. She worked as an NTSA investigator and FAA inspector and pilot instructor. When NASA finally, grudgingly, began admitting women to astronaut training in the eighties, she promptly applied. They had to keep inventing new reasons (you’re not an engineer, you’re too old now) to turn her down. 

 

Over the years she stayed pretty good friends with Dad and Mom. She would fly herself up from Dallas, packing just one little bag, and stay in the folks’ rambling wreck of a house while she visited friends in Albuquerque. Alone among mortals, she called him “Boats,” after his favorite hobby and email address. Somehow or other, Dollie and I never crossed paths with her until the aughts, when the folks’ health began failing, they needed us more, and our visits from Illinois began to grow longer. My first clear memory of Wally has her standing in my folks’ driveway, giving hand signals while I gingerly back our big fifth wheel camper into the backyard, through a tight gate. 

 

Wally was just what you see in the videos: a very tall woman with ramrod posture and a splendid head of thick, short, blazing white hair, dressed mannishly in cords and a crisply pressed, sharp-collared shirt. Apparently Mom had spotted me backing the rig and expressed some concern, and Wally, thinking she must help, bounded down the stairs to my assistance. 

 

People always try to give directions when you back a camper, especially if you are doing it badly. I learned long ago to pay no attention: you have no idea of their abilities, intentions, or what they really mean by this or that gesture; best muddle through on your own. Wally’s hand signals, though, were different from most people’s: more fluid and vigorous and a great deal more elaborate, almost like ASL. They must have been the signals an FAA inspector would naturally use in any average situation. She seemed to thoroughly enjoy giving them, and (again, unlike most people) showed no annoyance at all when I ignored her. Once we had the camper parked, she came over, thrust out a hand, and said, I swear, something on the order of, “Hi, I’m Wally, your folks’ friend. You know, the astronaut?”

 

Anyway she was just like that, as I found out over the next week or so, while Dollie and I shared the folks’ hospitality with her. She never tired of telling people how she had almost gone to space but been shafted by NASA. She liked confiding that she had beaten John Glenn’s record in the sensory deprivation chamber. But she told the tale without a trace of bitterness. The point was never that men were jerks or that the system sucked. It was that life was endlessly surprising and rather wonderful – for look at all that she had done – if sometimes a bit cruel. 

 

That great smile you see in the Bezos video was always ready, just her routine sense of and approach to life. Unflagging optimism and joie de vivre. “Anyway, I still might go,” she told us once or twice. “Maybe when Richard Branson goes up.” Dollie and I would swallow and look at our coffee. This was four decades after Wally’s chance seemed to have come and gone. She could still pilot a tiny aircraft up from Dallas, but she had trouble remembering the directions to Walmart, about a mile from the house. 

 

One morning shed surprising light on the small suitcase and the crisp jeans. Up early for some reason, I stumbled into the laundry room (there was a spare refrigerator in there) to find Wally ironing what seemed to be the only pants she had packed for the trip. Not even slightly embarrassed, she wrinkled her nose at Mom’s ancient iron and said, “I should have these done in just a coupla minutes.” 

 

That was the folks’ house in those days. Nothing worked, the yogurt in the fridge might be two years old, and most of the rooms had old broken TVs serving as end tables. But everyone was welcome, and if you got up early enough you might bump into a pretty famous almost-astronaut in her skivvies. 

 

My takeaway: you don’t get to be famous by giving in to embarrassment or other forms of self-doubt. The tradeoff, maybe, is that the great tend to be full of themselves, obsessed with their own projects. Wally was a little that way, but what mattered was her overflowing good cheer and good will. Now she gets the last laugh on everybody, but it will be the nicest, least gloating laughter you could imagine.

 

Keep your dreams, old people. You just never know what life may serve up next. God bless Wally! And just this once, God bless Jeff Bezos.

 

  

In the Paradise of Machines

  

 

 

1

 

I

magine a world where all the work is done by machines. It’s easy; nearly everyone has encountered the premise in science fiction films or stories. In the distant future, autonomous machines plant all the crops, fertilize them, harvest them, and turn them into table-ready cuisine. Machines build all the roads and bridges and dams, mine and refine all the ores and fuels, assemble all the vehicles, and produce all the consumer goods that make life safe and comfortable. These machines themselves are manufactured by other machines, in gigantic factories, and when they break down, still other machines promptly arrive to fix them. In the same way, robot nurses and doctors arrive to cure you when you feel sick. Robot chefs and waiters and maids feed you and clean up after you. Robot companions are available to talk when you feel like it. What luxury! But it all seems like a perfectly logical culmination of the material progress we have always lived with.

 

The premise can have a comic edge, as in an episode of The Jetsons I remember: up early on a Monday, George and Jane argue fiercely about whose turn it is to press the button of the machine that will make breakfast. Afterwards he goes off to a hard day at the plant, where his job is to turn a big machine on and off. Jane spends her day supervising the robot and other gizmos that keep the house spiffy and well supplied.

 

But a classic rendering of the theme, John Campbell’s 1934 story “Twilight,” has a gritty, melancholic cast. A time traveler from the year 3059 accidentally fast-forwards all the way to seven million-something A.D., where he sojourns about six months. On the return trip he overshoots again, landing in our own ken in 1932. His report from the far future is wonderfully bittersweet: the machines do everything: fulfill your every need, tell you anything you may be curious about, and take you anywhere you may want to go, even to the other planets. But in this should-be paradise the people, it seems, mainly sit around feeling useless. They have lost passion, purpose, creativity, and above all intellectual curiosity, something that Campbell, in a geeky twist, posits as the central human passion. (I wonder what he would make of Westworld, that libido-drenched TV hymn to decadence.) The traveler can’t stop muttering about the “marvelous machines” that “didn’t know how to stop,” and his one decisive act, before returning, is to set a computer to the task of rekindling human curiosity, as if that could keep seven million years from being seven million years.  

 

To be fair, the story is less a prim homily on the virtues of work than an existentialist meditation on time and desire and striving: Ecclesiastes updated for gearheads. Still, Campbell, like Wells in The Time Machine and numerous followers in the tradition, delivers a clear warning: In the paradise of machines, idleness will be a chief hazard and likely curse. The great existential question is supposedly the one that nags ex-presidents and billionaires: What will I do with myself now? How do I fill the hours? 

 

But there is another question, equally unavoidable to at least one pretty contented retiree, that never comes up: who owns those machines and their output? Cui bono? In that unimaginably wealthy future, how exactly are goods distributed? That, after all, is the question that has echoed through our actual history more than any other.

 

Campbell seems to regard the answer as obvious: of course, everyone shares equally, and no one much cares. In a world of categorical surplus, where the machines can satisfy everyone’s material wants many times over, why would anyone squabble over shares? His future looks pretty much like the worker’s paradise once promised by the communists, except that no one actually works anymore and everyone feels antsy about it. 

 

Here is the thing, though: we already live in such a world, splendidly automated and free of manual drudgery, without ever quite knowing it. We really do, but the place turns out to be anything but egalitarian. And it is as haunted by hallucinations of shortage as older societies were by the reality.

 

 

C

onsider that semi-truck on the freeway in front of you just now, hauling, let’s say, cattle to a feedlot somewhere. Ten or fifteen tons of cow, hurtling along at five miles over the speed limit: that is work if ever work was, value created in the most dramatic fashion; but who exactly is doing the work? The driver sits up there in the cab, performing certain small interventions to keep the truck safely speeding along. We call him the worker, but in fact nearly all the real production, the value added, comes from his mighty machine.

 

To see this clearly, you have to imagine him doing the same job by hand, on foot. Without machines, how long will it take him to transport thirty cows or so the four hundred miles (let’s say) to the feedlot, a day’s labor when he has the truck? How many trips, taking just two or three cows each time, followed by tedious cowless returns to get the next batch? How many overnight stays enroute, with food and lodging for him and the beasts to be deducted from his share of the value added?

 

Let’s be generous and estimate that on average, delivery of the cows now takes not one day, but sixty. That means that, in the original case, the truck contributed fifty-nine sixtieths of the production, the driver just one sixtieth. It means that the truck has taken us fifty-nine of sixty steps on the road from mere nature to the paradise of machines. But we’re not done here; far from it. To make the thought experiment fully relevant, you have to imagine our driver-turned-herder doing the job without help by machines of any sort, even at several removes. So take away his electric cattle prod. Take away that nice paved frontage road, so carefully laid down by a huge asphalt spreader and a half-dozen other machines, and make him stumble through the brush, losing a cow to predators every now and then. Take away his very clothes, his jeans and T-shirt and track shoes, since all those are machine-made, and make him a poor, bare, forked animal, clad in a loincloth and armed with nothing but a sharp stick. By now, surely, delivery of the small herd has become either an impossibility or a matter of years. This lets us see the true proportions that obtained back before we did our reverse Industrial Revolution on the picture: machines nearly a hundred percent, human contribution hardly a rounding error.

 

And all through the economy, everywhere in the world, the story is the same: the machines are doing nearly all the work, the humans almost none. Even our cows are essentially machine made. Their feed has been planted by seeding equipment, harvested by huge combines, and dispensed by tractor. Their drinking water has been pumped from deep underground, out of wells drilled by big derricks. Here and there humans flip a few switches, make some decisions, spread a forkful of hay. But the cows are essentially the product of cow-making machinery. 

 

We still get excited every time some productive process is automated a little further than it has been – when a new robot is installed on the line at GM, or self-checkout at Walmart, at the cost of a job here or there. But the truth is, the process has been going on since our ancestors came blinking down from the trees, and we are now much closer to Campbell’s endpoint than to that distant origin. Most of the journey to the paradise of machines has been completed.

 

Try the experiment, sometime, of keeping track as a big construction project goes up in your neighborhood. Dollars to doughnuts, what you will see is mostly nothing. The project simply sits, well short of completion, pending arrival of the necessary equipment. Then one day you drive by and the walls are up, the pit is dug, the roof is on, the pavement is down. At some point when you weren’t looking, the required machines finally arrived, and all the work was done in the blink of an eye. Sometimes (not often) you are lucky enough to glimpse a little of this. One member of the human crew is actually at the controls, completely absorbed in the levers that raise and lower the huge scoop. Three others lean on their shovels, watching and commenting. One smokes. It is not that they are lazy. It is that kibbitzing is really the most valuable thing they can do at that moment. Any production they can add with their hands or even their shovels is so trivial, compared to what the machine is doing, that it’s not worth bothering with. 

 

After this fatiguing bit of observation, wander into the convenience store at the corner, for a peek at the cashier. She certainly seems to be earning her keep. Ringing up purchases, shouting answers to customers, talking on the phone to her boss, tending the gas pumps remotely, even grabbing a mop or broom occasionally, she seems nearly a machine herself, poor devil. But how many of the dollars piling up in the registers are really her doing? The gasoline that is far and away the top-earning item has been drilled from the ground by one group of machines, refined by another group, delivered by a huge tanker truck, stored in a machine-made tank in a machine-dug hole under the concrete, and finally pumped out into the customers’ tanks by the self-service pumps there on the islands. All the goodies on the shelves and in the coolers – the candy bars, the cigarettes, the soda, the crackers, even the fresh doughnuts on the front rack and the greasy hot dogs turning on hot rollers – have come off the ends of assembly lines somewhere, then down a long conveyor slide into the automatic-crating machine, and on into the delivery truck with little or no human assistance. The vast contributions of machines not actually present are all hidden in the products they have created, and what remains to be seen is just the last little flourish of delivery. The busy cashier and her small salary are barely a footnote on the ledger that tracks the vast flow of goods in and out of the store.

 

A die-hard humanist might still insist that the truck driver and the cashier are making weighty contributions, since either is a sine qua non: till they turn the key, no work gets done, nothing happens. But this is like saying the nail in the shoe of a racehorse won the Kentucky Derby yesterday. Being a sine qua non of production, as many things inevitably are, is not the same as being the prime agent of it. That nail will not be fetching forty million dollars at auction next month.

2

S

o essentially, within a rounding error, we are no longer working, just living off the work of our magic machines. How could we have failed to notice something so fundamental? How could we not have been shocked, enthralled, and a little saddened all at once, at that grand moment when labor and drudgery became things of the past? And how could it feel as if the situation is just the opposite?

 

For of course it does feel that way. Starting in the Victorian era, anthropologists have studied the balance of labor and leisure in more and less “advanced” societies, consistently reaching a conclusion that can still seem astonishing: hunter-gatherers work least, preindustrial farmers somewhat more, and workers in modern industrialized societies the longest and the most. You can tinker with your definitions of work and leisure and the numbers will vary a bit, but the broad outlines of the picture stay the same: with all our “labor-saving” devices, we moderns are somehow laboring more than ever, while the true free spirits and lucky vacationers are our ancestors, whether tilling the pitiless ground or ranging the primeval woods. The literature, it seems, is full of interviews with tribal folk cheerfully explaining why they won’t take up farming or manufacture: it’s far too much work.

 

This surely ranks as one of the great tragic ironies of the human story, or perhaps one of the best cosmic jokes. We furless chimps dream of prosperity and security and a bit of repose, we battle diligently through the ages, always pursuing the dream, and we seem to achieve brilliant successes: flint weapons, iron, steel, the steam engine, penicillin, fertilizer, corn harvesters, air travel, sanitation, silicon, rock’n’roll, curling irons, dry martinis, everything entailed in what my eighth-grade world history text still called “the conquest of civilization.” We accomplish a trillionfold increase of production and consumption, largely vanquish disease and famine, multiply our own numbers exponentially, and cover the earth with our buildings and artifacts and ourselves. Then we pause for a look around and find that, on the leisure front at least, we have been going backwards all this time. How is that possible?

 

Many possible causes could be cited for this paradoxical decline of leisure – population growth, environmental degradation, increased elective consumption, consumerism, and on and on. But the chief culprit, surely, is the trademark flaw of capitalism: its abject failure to distribute the new wealth created by industrialization. As everyone learns in high school, industrialism in its early stages enriches the few while dispossessing the many, immiserating former farmers and craftsmen into a huge urban proletariat whose revolutionary potential Marx seems to have overestimated, but only by a whisker. According to a fairly standard narrative, things like the labor movement, countercyclical government spending, and welfare-state legislation then intervene to save capitalism from itself, forestalling an apocalyptically complete concentration of wealth. The intervention never achieves definitive economic justice, but it staves off collapse and delivers the consolation prize of a generally higher standard of living. 

 

Over the last three decades, though, the old dynamic of dispossession has unmistakably reasserted itself, and recently the graphs of income inequality look bad as ever. Thomas Piketty’s landmark Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2016) massively documents a steady worldwide increase of economic inequality, a problem seemingly fated to worsen as the snowballing of wealth, more even than the divergence of incomes between the educated and the non-, defines the economic landscape of our new Gilded Age. As in 1819, so again in 2019.

 

Poverty and hardship persist right on through the Industrial Revolution, then, and may once again be assuming crisis proportions. At one end, the fortunes of hedge fund tricksters, silicon prodigies, retail monopolists, and the like seem as oversized and morally dubious as those of the environment-trashing, union-busting, government-manipulating robber barons of the nineteenth century. At the other end, the definitions of subsistence may have changed, but average people are once again hard pressed, measurably dispossessed compared to their parents, working harder and harder just to get by. But all this is very strange, given the huge waves of new wealth that wash over the landscape, one after another, at every stage of industrialization, including several comprised in the digital revolution. Why has the distributional conundrum, essentially so simple, proved so persistent? Where does all the loot go?

 

People often notice that poverty under capitalism has an oddly contrived aspect: it seems less a bug than a feature, a thing needed to make the gears turn in that largest machine of all, the economy itself. Chronic hardship, unquestionably tolerated and arguably even engineered, is what keeps workers swarming to the factories when they could be enjoying the leisure their Neolithic ancestors once had. Conservatives like to blame poverty on the poor themselves, tracing it to improvidence and excessive consumption. But those very “vices” may be just what the system requires and urgently inculcates.

 

It is not a question of anyone’s evil intention, or of that overused shibboleth, “greed.” The point is more that industrial capitalism has a recursive property, turning both production and consumption into vicious cycles that endlessly demand more of themselves. In a market economy capital has no option of resting, of retiring from the game to enjoy its winnings: it must expand or die. However restrained in the short term, every firm is ultimately committed to the extinction and absorption of all the others; for businesses that try to stand pat or act altruistically get driven into bankruptcy and cannibalized by younger, fiercer, less scrupulous rivals. Competition is the tiger whose tail no one can let go.

 

This built-in insatiability on the productive side soon finds its consumption-side mirror image, since businesses must endlessly obtain new products, new markets, new customers. These are created through direct advertising, a force weighty and ubiquitous in itself, but also and more generally by the carry-over of the market ethos to the culture as a whole. Frantic hyperproduction and hyperconsumption emerge as central virtues and status markers, however we may rail against them in antiquated moral terms that no longer carry real conviction. The use value of goods gives way to market value, and particular desires coalesce into an abstract acquisitiveness that is truly boundless. Demand is sated and rekindled at once, in a kind of ongoing seduction that leaves one feeling that the new desires are one’s very own, not the contrivances of restless capital seeking expansion. 

 

Of course it is not just individuals who find new products to crave. As society’s overall productivity rises, the public sector likewise discovers an endless need to spend and consume, quite as if the goal were to destroy all surplus and arrive at poverty once again. Defense spending, the classic instance, specializes in producing the most exotic and expensive of machines, many of them destined to destruction as a matter of course, most obsolete virtually by definition before the first copy rolls off the line, all of them sanctioned by theories of deterrence whose devoutest precept is that, if the machines are produced and bought in sufficient numbers, they will never be used at all. (This last was nearly true of the dreadnought and has been completely true of ICBMs and their warheads.) The orgy of production is supposedly pragmatic, justified by the existential menace of a hostile world, but that argument fails to explain why some great powers can get by with defense budgets only a fraction of America’s. (Or why “the mightiest military in history” is so often bested by nearly unarmed guerrillas.)  “If you want peace,” runs the proverb, “Prepare for war,” and there is a bit of truth there. But from at least one angle, what is called national defense looks like capitalist ritual rather than sensible precaution.

 

That we fetishize production and consumption, valuing them for their own sakes rather than as mere means to happiness and health, has been especially clear during the Covid crisis. Not a fortnight into the first major lockdown, Trumpists were proclaiming that the economy must be reopened, runaway death rates be damned. Faced with public health measures considered anodyne in most of the world, the right responded with doomsday rhetoric, protest marches, civil disobedience, and even terrorist actions like trying to kidnap the governor of Michigan. Particular sages grimly averred their own willingness to brave death to keep the cash registers humming, and all made a high and holy cause of reopening such things as bars, dance clubs, beaches, and tattoo parlors. Apparently it never occurred to such folk that control of the virus was no alternative to economic recovery but a logical precondition; that there might be a way to save the tattoo artist short of reopening her shop, at the risk of her life and everyone else’s; that the emergency might be met by redistributing some of the vast reserves of wealth already in existence, rather than by redoubled hyperproduction. For such people (and this was accurate, as far as it went), the economy was a Rube Goldberg machine that could not perform its essential life-sustaining function without first performing dozens of extraneous ones. There was no way to prioritize; you had to get the whole clanking, clattering, Brobdingnagian machine running again. Business was a sacred thing, and to mess with any part of it was to threaten the lives and welfare of everyone.

 

The pitiless a priori at the root of such thinking was an atavism from the days of real shortage: no one must be paid who had not “earned it,” delivering a quantum of something that could be reckoned as work. For capitalism has never learned to distribute its riches except by meticulously tying each little allotment to some minute stage in the productive process, however fictive and arbitrary the value-added computations may be. Simply declaring subsistence, with some minimal level of consumption, to be a human right is a notion that never arrives or is greeted with ancient horror when it does. We still think we know that the road to ruin runs through sloth, greed, gluttony, dependency, and idleness while salvation lies with self-reliance, thrift, industry, temperance and the work ethic. A work force not menaced by privation might recover the Neolithic habit of going to lie down under the trees when it feels like it. And that would mean the end of the world.

 

There have always been people who escape such manufactured mindsets, seeing through the hallucination of shortage, and lately there seem to be more of them. With the several relief and stimulus bills, we seem to be inching toward acceptance of redistribution, at least in emergencies, as a normal function of government. But I still count us mostly hypnotized by the cult of hyperproduction, with its gospel of endless economic growth and ever more work, even in ages of what would be called overemployment if we could conceive of such a notion. We stumble into each new election with candidates on both sides promising to “fix” and “grow” the economy, either by cutting taxes and social spending or by doing the exact opposite, each side promising that its particular magic will boost production, “create jobs,” and thereby solve countless other problems. What no one points out is that boosting production and vastly multiplying the net wealth of the species has never really solved our human problems in the long run, but only in the short, prior to multiplying and intensifying them once more. 

 

The argument from jobs creation can be well intentioned, even right in particular instances. As a general thing, though, the politician who promises to create jobs, fooling even himself perhaps, is playing a semantic shell game that tries to present a problem as a solution. The jobs supposedly created have invariably been cut somewhere else, and the money to pay the wages does not arrive out of thin air. A moon shot or Tennessee Valley project does indeed employ thousands of people, some of them recently unemployed, at tasks often dramatically novel; it also soaks up tons of surplus that might otherwise have paid the wages of teachers, welders, or flagpole-sitters now facing an unaccountable round of layoffs. And to the extent that there really is a net increase of new jobs, what is so good about that? “Job” in such formulations is always really a proxy for “income,” the only thing that is really wanted, and if one can be had without the unpleasantness of actual work, so much the better.

 

Of course jobs are also a source of personal fulfillment, of the deep pride that comes from vanquishing pain and seeing plans through to fruition and winning the esteem of peers. This, though, is never the thing the jobs-mongering politician is talking about, except at intervals when she pauses to lecture the poor about their alleged overconsumption. Otherwise “jobs” for her means essentially a payoff or entitlement: a brief loosening of the ancient knot that binds consumption to production, before re-tying it tighter than ever. Slice that knot, make subsistence a human right, and leisure, sweet leisure, if the system ever produces any, will still offer countless routes to self-respect, for those who are into that kind of thing. Think of that friend you have who competes in triathlons as a way of relaxing after a brutal week arranging flowers at the shop. 

 

As for our unshakable commitment to economic expansion, our faith in it as a panacea, that may go down as the idea that killed the species. In a few brief centuries, hardly a heartbeat in geological or biological time, we have mass-produced and modernized the planet right to the brink of uninhabitability, at least for us and everything we care about (microbes have some intriguing plans for actually surviving the coming flame-out). The only thing that has ever produced even a slight dip in the curves that chart our progress toward self-immolation is that terror of terrors, severe economic recession. 2009 produced such graphs, and 2020. But just try to imagine a politician who strides to the podium to promise fewer jobs, less economic growth. You simply can’t.

 

 

T

hus we end up richer than our forebears ever dreamed of being, but also poorer, infected as we are with the endless economic discontent that is a bedrock value of our culture. For all the vastness of our per capita wealth, compared to that of any previous era, most of us end up living paycheck to paycheck, haunted by the math of our monthly and yearly budgets. In a famous recent study, a majority of Americans reported that they would be unable to raise four hundred dollars to weather a financial emergency. The number is incredible, inexplicable. It would have to mean either that most respondents simply didn’t understand how credit works (Dude, refinance your truck) or that they really had ruined their credit at some point (actually a pretty hard thing to do). I rate both possibilities highly doubtful, but the study nonetheless rang true as a parable of how one is supposed to feel as a good citizen of late capitalism: always over-extended, insecure, and hence available to work sixty-hour weeks, commuting to work in that car one cannot really afford, in uncomfortable clothes that ditto.  

 

The result of everything is that the vast apparatus of capitalism – the huge factories, the world-eating machines, the banks and stock exchanges, the Amazon River of goods and services, the infinite larder of bizarre superfluities – is not just a spectacularly successful system for meeting and gratifying needs, but equally, or even a little more, one for exacerbating and multiplying them. Leisure dwindles because its precondition, satiety, never arrives. Wealth and poverty are produced in close tandem, and the rat race is kept going by the very machines that promise to end it. 

 

Clearly, then, industrialization has been a treadmill and something of a trap. It continuously subtracts labor from the productive equation but then adds it invisibly right back in, plus interest. At the end of three centuries of fabulous and brilliant labor-savings, somehow you have more work to do than ever, both because you feel poor and because, by many plausible measures, you really are. What a strange existence we have made for ourselves! Campbell had it right: our machines have made us richer than Croesus and mightier than the Titans, but in the process they have robbed us of self-respect and peace of mind. 

 

And this is to say nothing of the planet industrialization has ruined, the era of mass extinctions it has brought on, the climate calamity it is producing ever more briskly.

 

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o okay, you tell me, machine-assisted labor is a thousand times more productive than hand labor. The machines are doing all the work, as you put it. How does that change anything? Aren’t we still just having the same old argument between common ownership on the one hand, and the ancient, labyrinthine protocols of private property on the other?

 

Fair enough, I admit, a little sullenly. But awareness that we are already living in the paradise of machines (however miserably) can at least sharpen old arguments for redistribution. And it weakens the standard counter-argument of socialism’s supposed impracticality, its inability to incentivize labor and production. A calamity like the coronavirus plague, which idles 95% of the work force, looks apocalyptic when you think in terms of work stopping entirely. People can be fooled into thinking we have come to an economic Donner Pass where eating the old is justified. But the mirage dissipates when you reflect that the machines themselves have not gotten sick, that the real problem is just to keep them going. Under capitalism we really are quite like George and Martha Jetson, thinking we do the job because we press the button. The relative unimportance or fungibility of human labor was a lesson Wall Street seemed to be implicitly learning very early in the pandemic, when the stock market panicked and gave up a third of its value in a day, then sheepishly recovered it in a return march over the next month, realizing as it were that machines do not get sick. Gosh, never mind: perceptions of crisis shortage yielded to the reality of continued, categorical overproduction. 

 

But what about basic fairness? you say. Granting for a moment that machines are doing all the work, those machines still have owners who deserve to be recompensed. And who must be recompensed, to incentivize the next round of investment and production and ward off the economic stagnation that always threatens.

 

Well, I say, I'm glad you bring that up. How about that claim to ownership of the magic truck that hauls the cows to market? Stay with me on this one. Like all machines that truck, all thirty tons of it, is primarily and essentially an immaterial creation. If you reduce the truck to its material components — the steel, the glass, the polished chrome, the rubber that began life in a tree in the Amazon — what do you have, really? None of that by itself can move the cows an inch closer to market. The essential thing, the only really important thing, is the know-how, the ingenuity, the brilliant understanding, accumulated step by painful step over the ages, of just how to make and maintain and operate such a thing as a truck. That techne is quintessentially the possession of the whole species, a basic resource that ought to be free as air or water. Trying to own it, even though our laws make such things possible, is fundamentally like trying to own the Ten Commandments or Yosemite or the French language.

 

But what about the work of really making the truck? Of acquiring all the materials and shaping them and putting the whole thing together?

 

Ninety-nine percent of it has been done by other machines. We established that early on, remember?

 

So where you’re going is to an idea as monstrous as it is ridiculous: that we have a basic, inalienable human right to be taken care of by our magic machines. 

 

Exactly. We understand each other at last.

 

 

A

s to the threat of economic stagnation, what an intelligent alien (that indispensable witness) would say about it is agonizingly obvious:

 

“Earthlings! Friends and neighbors in the whirling galaxy! You are mistaking your situation entirely. The problem is not how to produce more, but how to produce less. You have already produced and surfeited and multiplied yourselves, all seven billion of you, to the brink of extinction. Our mathematicians currently put the likelihood of your demise at 99.9%, which is right at the average for species on your planet, but shouldn’t better be expected of beings considered intelligent?

 

“Sadly, to answer my own question, no. In our wanderings, we Glyphnids have encountered thousands of sentient species, mostly on planets just like your own. What we have seen again and again, with only a handful of exceptions, is that intelligence once evolved is a fatal curse. Its possessors first experience a brief honeymoon period – a few centuries maybe, five hundred millennia tops – in which they enjoy dramatic reductions of mortality, hunger, disease, physical hardship, pain in general. But then comes a rote succession of catastrophes: agriculture, cyclic famine and disease, industry, poverty, culture itself, urbanization, radical overpopulation and resource depletion, chronic war, mechanization, and then at the end, sudden as a flare shot from a sinking ship, a worldwide all-consuming spasm of hyperproduction, almost admirable in its way, that leaves the species extinct and the planet a burnt-out cinder that nothing but a few weeds and microbes continue to enjoy.

 

“You must wonder how the Glyphnids have managed to evade this death spiral, which except for us seems fixed by iron laws. Sadly, I am not at liberty to say; but don’t worry about it. All the smart money on Glyphia now believes you are irrevocably locked into the sequence, and in fact the betting exchanges have been closed since the early 1800s, earth time. Escape is now impossible and extinction certain, but that was always a likelihood; we live in a mortal universe, not just for individuals but for species, for planets, even for galaxies. At this point you can’t save yourselves, but you can qualitatively improve and slightly lengthen the time you have left. That is the real reason you should constrain population, curtail hyperproduction, share universally, protect what is left of your ecosphere, quit hypnotizing yourselves to believe in categorical shortage and the imperative of competition, and stop building machines that produce always more, always more pointlessly. Doing all this will be a last honorable use of the intelligence that has doomed you. It will make your remaining years more enjoyable, and it will leave you feeling better about yourselves.”