Dragonwriter
Page 17
During this period when I was trying to make sense of my world, pondering so many contradictions between the myth of America and the reality I found increasingly impossible to ignore, I encountered a quote from Bertrand Russell where he declared, “I would rather be mad with the truth than sane with lies.” This had a tremendous impact on me and has probably done more to shape my life than any other English sentence I ever encountered. And it was through many conversations with my confidant/mother that I came to make that declaration my own.
The Vietnam War was a test, not only for my generation and myself, but for my family. Anne McCaffrey was the proud daughter of a career military man, Colonel George Herbert McCaffrey. Her views about service were heavily shaped by him and by the experience of having both him and her eldest brother, Hugh “Mac” McCaffrey, serve in and survive World War II. At first she regarded the draft for Vietnam as being no different than the similar call that brought her relatives to war in 1942. My father always supported my desire not to serve in Vietnam, and in fairly short order, my mother came to see that the war was a “bright, shining lie.” In 1970 she had moved to Ireland, where draft evasion wasn’t a crime and therefore not an extraditable offense, and so my short-lived exile began there in 1971. Early in 1972, the draft lottery I was subject to happened; I “won” the lottery, which meant my selective service status was changed and I was no longer subject to U.S. military service.
I remained in Ireland for several years and had a number of adventures. I was a trawling fisherman, and later a rabbit-hunter on the Great Blasket Island, the southwesternmost part of Ireland. I finally wound up working for the Simon Communities in Belfast—an organization that served as a “safety net” for all those who fell through Britain’s existing social safety net—where I got to witness civil war firsthand, even surviving a bomb blast that exploded across the street from the shelter I worked in. Employment opportunities were scarce, however, for an alien resident living in the very impoverished Republic of Ireland in the ’70s, and by 1973,1 had returned to the States.
That was the year of the first OPEC oil embargo, and I got to live through the rest of the ’70s, a period marked by a lackluster economy that resulted in large measure from that oil price shock. I was able to make the best of it and during that period served as the last business manager of Liberation Magazine and went on to found the 100 Flowers Bookstore Coop in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was also the residential director of a halfway house for ex-mental patients, drawing on my earlier experience in Belfast. All the while, my mother’s career was developing, and it went ballistic with The White Dragon.
It was shortly after The White Dragon hit number six on the New York Times Bestseller List that Anne McCaffrey gave me a tremendous gift: a second chance at college. In 1970 I had enrolled in SUNY3 Stony Brook, but that was the year after my parents had divorced, and I wasn’t in the right frame of mind for academics. By the late ’70s I was more than ready, and as Mom’s success began to translate into significant financial gains, she made me an offer. I could either spend a year traveling around Europe, all expenses paid, or I could go back to college. For me it was a no-brainer, and I quickly matriculated into the University of Massachusetts, where I majored in economics.
The UMass Economics Department was unusual, and its distinctiveness was why I chose to go there. I studied traditional neoclassical theory, but I also studied its progressive critique. Prepared as I now was to risk becoming “mad with the truth,” I was able to shed many unhelpful myths about the true nature of the United States, imperialism, and the global economy. Mindful of what a tremendous gift my mother had given me, I became a devoted student and graduated cum laude (almost magna cum laude), was invited to submit a senior honors thesis, and earned a departmental distinction.
Despite my dedication to higher learning, I continued with my activism. At UMass I helped form a progressive student organization that was able to unseat the reactionary and somewhat racist status quo in the student assembly. In my junior year, activists on campus became outraged when UMass refused to grant tenure to a pair of African-American faculty members, chiefly, as near as we could tell, because their field was African-American studies. We revived a tactic not seen in a decade and occupied the administration building, refusing to leave until we were all arrested. Our acquittal on all charges was a pleasant surprise, but the crowning moment, and one I had to share with my mother, was when we were all invited to a Baptist Church in South Boston to be honored for our sacrifice. During this ceremony we received letters thanking us for our devotion to the struggle for equal rights. When I visited my mom for Christmas later that year in Ireland, I presented her with that letter, as there was no one else on Earth who deserved it more.
Around the same time, I became concerned about the safety of nuclear power in general and of a very specific power plant in Seabrook, New Hampshire.4 I became part of the now-legendary Clamshell Alliance, which tried repeatedly to shut down the Seabrook’s nuclear power station. As ever, I enjoyed my mother’s unstinting support, even as the stakes grew much higher. During the course of several actions in and around Seabrook, I was arrested twice, maced once, and savagely beaten by a pair of state troopers while I was peacefully surrendering on another occasion. One of those arrests resulted in a fortnight’s incarceration. All of these arrests were the result of nonviolent civil disobedience. At this point, Mom had settled in Ireland, so I had to regale her with my adventures over the phone.
My decade-long career in software engineering started in the early ’80s and gave me considerable insight into the bizarre and often insane world of corporate America. I had grown quite weary of “maximizing shareholder value,” and during a visit with my mother in Ireland in 1994, it was decided that I would become her general manager, in charge of everything but her literary affairs. And so from 1995 until 2004, I lived in Ireland and did my best to manage several small businesses Anne McCaffrey owned, handle fan relations, and deal with Hollywood. My previous experience with the corporate world didn’t prepare me for the vicious world of Hollywood. Lynda Obst, who produced Sleepless in Seattle, wrote her Hollywood memoirs under the title, Hello, He Lied. I came to fully appreciate her view of that industry, and it’s fair to say I was out of my depth when it came to Tinseltown. Still, I loved Ireland, was largely helpful to my mother, and would probably be there still were it not for George W. Bush.
It’s hard to discuss Bush without also discussing 9/11, and for me that day had personal significance as a very close friend, Anna Allison, was on the first plane to plow into the Twin Towers. I grew furious watching Cheney and Bush turn that tragedy into carte blanche for a criminal invasion of Iraq. Although never dormant, my activist self was now fully reengaged, and I got directly involved with Ireland’s antiwar movement. This included participating in demonstrations outside the U.S. embassy, which had been transformed into a fortress, utterly out of place with the lovely Georgian doorways surrounding that strange spectacle. Anne McCaffrey was, of course, fully supportive of this, and were it not for the difficulty she had standing for any length of time, I’m sure she would’ve joined me.
In March 2003, I got to be part of a huge protest against the impending Iraq War. It was the largest gathering in Dublin since the Easter Rebellion. Yet as inspiring as that day was in Dublin and across the world, it failed to stop the “shock and awe” Bush unleashed that March. It was then that I realized that I had a duty to return to the States and, as a U.S. citizen, do everything in my power to eject Bush from the White House.
While an interesting tale could be told about my adventures leading the top canvass team in Iowa for the anti-Bush group known as America Coming Together, everyone knows how that story ended. Having worked harder than John Kerry did to give Bush the boot, I was distressed, to say the least, that grim November. And just when I thought my despair had reached bottom, my inner Bertrand Russell was confronting a rising Red Star even more alarming than four more years of George Bush, as it was then tha
t I came to fully understand the peril we’ve come to call “peak oil.”
I had heard a bit about peak oil even before arriving in Iowa, but during the campaign I could only nibble at an article or two and only on rare occasions. It was in that dark November that I read several books on the subject and found myself riveted by the topic, and not in a good way. Back then peak oil was a theory; now it is an acknowledged fact. It refers to the point at which global oil extraction reaches its apogee and then declines irrevocably thereafter. The reason this is such a big deal is that energy is the master resource of the world’s economy, and oil remains the principal source of energy both for transportation and heating purposes, but also for food production. All fertilizer and all pesticides come from fossil fuels. More than 300,000 commonly used products, including innumerable pharmaceuticals, also come from this now-depleting resource. Even more alarming, we have good reason to believe that humanity has been able to artificially expand the carrying capacity for our species on this planet by about a factor of three because of our ability to exploit fossil fuels. Passing peak oil meant that energy boon would rapidly deplete, resulting in profound economic and political stresses, widespread instability, and the very serious threat of social collapse.
That November 2004, estimates for when peak oil might be reached ranged from 2007 to 2010. The International Energy Agency, which is the official body that the governments of the world rely on for the straight dope on energy, spent much of this century demonizing anyone who suggested that we were at or near peak oil. (Years later in 2010, with very little fanfare, they admitted that peak oil was real and that the world had passed it in 2006! It was a stunning about-face, but one that received remarkably little press given how significant it is.) This was, to be sure, a Red Star rising here on Earth, and only a very few people even saw it coming. As a trained economist and someone who had experienced the consequences of oil price shocks in the 1970s, it was clear to me that there would be very serious consequences. And I truly feared, and still fear to this day, for my children’s future.
In 2004, when hardly anyone even knew what peak oil was, much less what a threat it posed, it was easy to feel much like Troy’s Cassandra. And more than once did I recall the stories my mom told me about her father, who saw World War II coming way before most others did. The Colonel, as he was called even by his children, had a brother-in-law who was an engineer and had occasion to visit Germany in the late 1930s. He saw that they were retooling for war production, and Colonel McCaffrey took him seriously. Mom told me how her dad was the subject of much ridicule on the army base he served at when he insisted that troops under his command drill with full packs and generally prepare for the war he was certain would shortly arrive. Writing now, I find myself wondering if Mom’s own father was the inspiration for F’lar. I wouldn’t be at all surprised. He was a major figure in her life.
Wrapping my brain around peak oil and its implications was hugely challenging. And as you might imagine, it didn’t make for pleasant cocktail chatter. The Bush administration, it turns out, knew all about it. They had the Energy Department commission a report, which came to be known as the Hirsch Report, after its lead author, Robert Hirsch. Its executive summary declared that, “The peaking of world oil production presents the U.S. and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem” [emphasis added]. The term “unprecedented” appeared often in the Hirsch Report, and it was a very serious warning indeed. So it should come as no shock at all that the report was repressed by the Bush administration. In fact, for a while the only place it could be found was on the Chula Vista High School website—seriously, you can’t make this stuff up. I read an interview with Hirsch years later in which he confessed how tremendously frightened he was by his findings. So was I, but I soon learned that this wasn’t even half of the rising “Red Star” we’re now confronting.
Global warming is so much on my mind today that it’s curious that I can’t recall when I first came across the concept, but by early 2009 it had my full attention. I was living in Eureka, California, at the time, and some of the local activists had organized a round-trip train to Washington, DC, to be part of a big action that involved encircling and shutting down the coal-fired plant that powers the U.S. Congress. So in early March 2009, I found myself traveling from Sacramento toward our nation’s capital on an Amtrak train. It proved to be a most pleasant way to traverse the country. And it delivered stunning confirmation of the seriousness of climate change on the very first day. Traveling through the Sierras, we arrived in an area covered, as far as the eye could see in every direction, with pine trees. But they were all dead; every tree that should’ve sported green bristles instead had dead brown ones. It was so stark that even the train conductor commented on it over the public address system. The cause was the mountain pine beetle, an insect that had never threatened these trees before but now was killing them wholesale because climate change had forced their northern migration. It was a chilling vision.
The trip was life-changing, and I called my mother, as I always did, to enthrall her with tales of my adventures shutting down Congress’s coal plant that freezing March day. I did not, however, tell her about the dead trees. I didn’t think there was any point in frightening her. She had given me so much for so long that I knew I could still draw strength from her without imposing the terrible burden of what I knew on her now-frail shoulders. And even now that she has passed, I find I can still draw the strength I need to fight from her lifelong support.
Today the twin perils of peak oil and global warming are even more threatening, more of a Red Star rising, than ever before. And while this bronze rider has been defeated—and painfully so, on too many occasions—I remain bolted to my wherhide saddle. My major regret is that during the last years of my mother’s life, I was so busy that years went by without my visiting the Dragonlady in her Wicklow Weyr. In November of 2011, I was on my way, at last, to visit Mom and enjoy Thanksgiving with her. I had no idea that when my plane was taking off from Columbus, Ohio, my mother’s life was coming to an end. The grim news greeted me upon my arrival in Dublin. I knew well before then that I would never be able to prepare myself for such a staggering loss. I think of her every day, and I speak to her often. And I hope that I will be able to do my part, as F’lar did on Pern, to raise the alarm and to take my place on the front lines in this most urgent existential struggle. I’d like to think that, thanks to Anne McCaffrey, I am equal to this challenge.
ALEC JOHNSON currently lives in East Texas with a community of activists successfully challenging the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline in Oklahoma and Texas. In January 2013, he was arrested as part of a nonviolent civil disobedience action that disrupted the offices of TransCanada, the pipeline’s builder.
Proud father of Eliza and Amelia, he draws much motivation for the global warming struggle from the confidence that he fights not only for their future, but for the future of everyone’s children and future generations without a voice.
1 Climate change, climate disruption, a rose by any other name signifies the same impending disaster.
2 Six of the ten top corporations on Earth are fossil-fuel based.
3 State University of New York.
4 My view of nuclear power is now more nuanced, considering the crisis now unfolding in the related realms of climate and energy. While I’d prefer they not be built, I’d rather a nuclear power plant over a coal-fired plant any day.
Angels come in all sizes. Mostly we don’t recognize them until they’re already gone from our lives. I think we all have the potential to be an angel, if only for a few seconds and only for that one person who most needs to hear our words.
Angelina “Angel” Adams writes here about how Anne McCaffrey was, in effect, her angel in a hard time.
I think you’ll see when you read her words why I say it is a great honor to have her contribution to Dragonwriter.
Changes Without Notice
ANGELINA ADAMS
SO V
ERY OFTEN, the pivotal moments of our lives slip by without fanfare or notice. Such was the day I picked up my first Anne McCaffrey book. Unlike many of her fans, I had not grown up reading science fiction. Instead of curling up with a good book, I spent most of my teenage years with scripts, arias, and in rehearsals. This meant I missed joining my friends on the mass migration from horse books and classics to science fiction and fantasy. It also meant I had no idea of the treasure I was holding when I saw her name for the first time.
At twenty-four, my life was in the middle of a major shift. I was adjusting to being a new wife and mother, I had quit performing, and I was attempting to adjust to life in a new city. My cousin had come to visit, and as is often the case when traveling, he left behind a few items. Among them was a very orange book that had, of all things, a picture of someone riding a dragon on the cover. Orange had never been one of my favorite colors, and dragons weren’t my thing, so I set the book aside with every intention of mailing it to my cousin.
Somehow that book kept moving around the house. It seemed every time I cleaned, it was in the way, tossed on top of a table or countertop. It felt as if I were constantly picking it up and returning it to the drawer where the other items I needed to mail were stored. One day, as I was walking the book back to where it was supposed to be, I opened the back cover and the “About the Author” caught my eye. The line “She studied voice for nine years and during that time, became intensely interested in the stage direction of opera and operetta” caught my eye. I was intrigued. I continued to read, and other words jumped out at me: children, Ireland, cats, dogs, and horses. Those were some of my most favorite things. I felt an immediate affinity for this person. She sounded like someone I would be friends with. Then I read the last line, “Of herself, Ms. McCaffrey says, ‘I have green eyes, silver hair, and freckles; the rest changes without notice.’”